Ed Ruscha's Streets of Los Angeles: artist, image, archive, city

Abstract

"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 car rigged with a motorized camera to capture Los Angeles' most iconic street: Sunset Boulevard. He created a time capsule of its famed facades, beginning a sixty-year-long commitment to documenting the changing urban landscape of postwar Los Angeles. The Streets of Los Angeles project that comprises these photographs is likely the most comprehensive artistic record of any city, with over 900,000 images of major thoroughfares. Ruscha's photographs constitute an unparalleled visual chronicle of both iconic and everyday sites in L.A., including 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 city's visual culture. Using his photographs and new data visualizations, the authors consider what it means to interpret an archive mostly accessible through digital technologies, and they demonstrate how histories of art have been indelibly reshaped since the advent of the information age in the 1960s."-- Publisher's website.

Contents

Project / Zanna Gilbert and Emily Pugh -- Introduction / Andrew Perchuk, Zanna Gilbert, Emily Pugh -- Ed Ruscha's Streets of Los Angeles : a narrative history / Zanna Gilbert, Jennifer Quick -- Archiving the archive : processing the Streets of Los Angeles photographs / Beth Ann Guynn, David Newbury, Lily Pregill -- Seeing the system : data visualization as critical practice / Emily Pugh, Eric Rodenbeck -- Artist / Zanna Gilbert -- No design : the Streets photographs and Ruscha's books / Jennifer Quick -- Information man / Andrew Perchuk -- "Almost too hot to handle" : Ed Ruscha's Every Building on the Sunset Strip / Alyce Mahon -- Disruption and recursion : on Ruscha's criticality / Margaret Iversen -- Image / Isabel Frampton Wade -- Seeing the strip : the photographic archives of J. B. Jackson, Ed Ruscha, and Denise Scott Brown / Britt Salvesen -- "The tyranny of the glossy" : commercial architectural photography and Ruscha's streets / Isabel Frampton Wade -- Ed Ruscha's street photos and the cinematic sequence shot / Mark Shiel -- Nightmare of information : Ed Ruscha's image critique / Eva Ehninger -- Archive / Tracy Stuber -- Some Los Angeles streets : Ed Ruscha in the library and archive / Emily Pugh -- Mnemopolis / Susan Laxton -- From banks to blanks : the poetic spaces of automated vision / Kate Palmer Albers -- City / Emily Pugh -- Now before then : Ed Ruscha's Streets of Los Angeles Project and the anticipation of an archive / Amy Murphy -- Streets of another Los Angeles : geographies of exclusion and difference / Eric Avila -- Ed Ruscha's street-level view and the postwar redevelopment vernacular / Francesca Russella Ammon, Brian D. Goldstein, Garrett Dash Nelson -- An urban grammar for the Streets of Los Angeles archive : types and town watching in the arterial datascape / Gabrielle Experdy, with contributions by Damon Crockett -- Songs for every address : the music of Ed Ruscha's photographs / Josh Kun.