New Volume Explores Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles Archive

In 1966, renowned artist Ed Ruscha embarked on a groundbreaking project to document Los Angeles’ most iconic street: Sunset Boulevard.

Using a car rigged with a motorized camera, Ruscha captured the famed facades of this bustling thoroughfare, creating a time capsule that spans six decades. This ambitious endeavor, known as the Streets of Los Angeles project, has resulted in likely the most comprehensive artistic record of any city, with over 900,000 images of major thoroughfares.

Ruscha’s photographs offer an unparalleled visual chronicle of both iconic and everyday sites in L.A., such as popular music venues, neighborhood restaurants, and billboards promoting Hollywood’s latest blockbusters. Now, this extraordinary archive is accessible to all through a free digital book, Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles: Artist, Image, Archive, City (Getty Research Institute, FREE). In this volume, scholars from diverse disciplines—including urban planning, cultural geography, architecture, art history, and musicology—delve into the Streets of Los Angeles Archive. They explore it as a rich repository for analyzing Ruscha’s practice and the city’s visual culture. Utilizing his photographs and innovative data visualizations, the authors examine what it means to interpret an archive primarily accessible through digital technologies. They also demonstrate how the advent of the information age in the 1960s has indelibly reshaped art histories.

This publication was created using Quire™, a multiformat publishing tool from Getty. The free online edition of this open-access publication, which includes video, data visualizations, and zoomable illustrations, is available with free PDF and EPUB downloads.