Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles

Making Ed Ruscha’s photo archive publicly accessible for the first time

Categories
- Art History
- Digitization & Access
Years 2015 – 2025
Status
- Completed
Organizer
- Getty Research Institute

Overexposed photograph of cars in the foreground with palm trees in the background. — Photographs of Sunset and Hollywood Boulevard (detail), 1965-2010, photo by Ed Ruscha. Negative frame from 35 mm film reel. Getty Research Institute, 2012.M.1. © Ed Ruscha

About

Goal

By digitizing five decades of Ed Ruscha’s photographic project to document the streets of Los Angeles, the Getty Research Institute provided a crucial, publicly available resource to researchers of history, art, and architecture. Through an ongoing research initiative with external scholars, the project also contributed to current discourses in digital art history. It situated the Streets of Los Angeles archive within various historical frameworks, highlighting what it can tell us about modern art, architecture, and the changing physical, social, and cultural landscapes of Los Angeles.

Outcomes

A peer-reviewed digital publication, Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles: City, Archive, Image, Artist, which contextualizes Ruscha’s archive as an extension of his artistic practice and includes sixteen original scholarly essays, data visualizations, and two multimedia artist projects (forthcoming July 2025)
12 Sunsets, an interactive website allowing users to access and explore Ruscha’s digitized shoots of Sunset Boulevard
The digitization of over 140,000 negatives from the archive
Programming with contemporary artists and thinkers

Background

In 1966, Ed Ruscha began a sweeping, systematic, and innovative effort to photograph the streets of Los Angeles, leading to the creation of his famed artist book, Every Building on the Sunset Strip. Using a motorized camera mounted on the back of a pickup truck, he photographed every building on each side of some of the city’s major thoroughfares. Ruscha continued this practice for over five decades, tracking streets such as Hollywood Boulevard, Melrose Avenue, and Sunset Boulevard. The result is a methodical documentation of an evolving Los Angeles cityscape.
Ruscha’s expansive effort to record the streets of Los Angeles led to a treasure trove of archival materials, which for decades remained mostly unseen. Containing over half a million items—including negatives, digital files, contact sheets, and notebooks—the Ed Ruscha Streets of Los Angeles Archive is so vast that even Ruscha and his team have not seen many of the images. When the Getty Research Institute acquired the archive in 2012, it subsequently launched an ambitious project to digitize this material and make it widely accessible.

Project Team

Project Leads
- Zanna Gilbert, Senior Research Specialist, GRI
- Andrew Perchuk, Deputy Director, GRI
- Emily Pugh, Principal Research Specialist, GRI
Past Project Leads
- David Newbury, Assistant Director, Software & User Experience, Getty Digital
- Lily Pregill, Assistant Director, Collection & Content Management Systems, Getty Digital
Project Managers
- Nathaniel Deines, IT Project Manager, Software & User Experience, Getty Digital
- Megan Sallabedra, Research Associate, GRI
- Isabel Wade, Research Associate, GRI
Digitization
- Chris Edwards, Digital Imaging Architect, GRI
- Teresa Soleau, Digital Preservation Manager, Collection & Content Management Systems, Getty Digital
Research
- Homer Arnold, Research Assistant, GRI
- Whitney Graham, Research Assistant, GRI
- CC Marsh, Research Assistant, GRI
- Tracy Stuber, Research Specialist, GRI
- Karly Wildenhaus, Research Assistant, GRI
- Margot Yale, Research Assistant, GRI
- Kate Albers, Whittier College
- Francesca Russello Ammon, University of Pennsylvania
- Eric Avila, University of California, Los Angeles
- Damon Crockett, Yale University
- Doug Duhaime, Yale University
- Eva Ehninger, Humboldt University of Berlin
- Gabrielle Esperdy, New Jersey Institute of Technology
- Brian Goldstein, Swarthmore College
- Margaret Iversen, University of Essex
- Josh Kun, University of Southern California
- Susan Laxton, University of California, Riverside
- Alyce Mahon, University of Cambridge
- Amy Murphy, University of Southern California
- Garrett Nelson, Leventhal Map and Education Center, Boston Public Library
- Jennifer Quick, independent scholar
- Britt Salvesen, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
- Mark Shiel, King’s College London
- Stamen Design, San Francisco