Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles

Through analysis of Ed Ruscha's visionary Streets of Los Angeles Archive, this volume provides new understandings of his artistic practice, the history of L.A., and the innovative role of technology in the archive.

In 1966, Ed Ruscha drove a pickup truck rigged with a motorized camera to capture Los Angeles's most iconic street: Sunset Boulevard. Navigating the boulevard, he created a time capsule of its famed facades, beginning an almost sixty-year-long commitment to documenting the changing urban landscape of postwar Los Angeles. The Streets of Los Angeles Archive that comprises these photographs is likely the most comprehensive artistic record of any city, with over 740,000 images of major thoroughfares. Ruscha's photographs constitute an unparalleled visual chronicle of some of Los Angeles's most iconic sites while also capturing the tapestry of everyday life-popular music venues, neighborhood restaurants, and billboards promoting Hollywood's latest blockbusters.

In this volume, scholars from disciplines such as urban planning, cultural geography, architecture, art history, and musicology explore the Streets of Los Angeles Archive as a rich repository for analyzing Ruscha's practice and the visual culture of the city. Using his photographs and dynamic data visualizations, the authors consider what it means to interpret an archive mostly accessible through digital technologies and demonstrate how histories of art have been indelibly reshaped since the advent of the information age in the 1960s.

The free online edition of this open-access publication is available at www.getty.edu/publications/ruscha/. Also available are free PDF and EPUB downloads of the book.