The starting point for Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles, his 1966 book Every Building on the Sunset Strip, is unique among his photographic books for its claim to comprehensiveness. Unlike Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963), Some Los Angeles Apartments (1965), or A Few Palm Trees (1971), Every Building declares to record just that: every building on the well-known stretch of Sunset Boulevard. Facetious or not, the title’s documentary pretensions nonetheless color the longer Streets of Los Angeles endeavor. The systematic quality of Ruscha’s car-meets-camera, the consistency and comparability of the resulting photographs, the massive number of photographs, and the project’s decades-long duration all give it an archival aura that arguably precedes the photographs and the particular historical information they preserve.
The essays in the “Archive” section place the Streets of Los Angeles project at the center of issues that have preoccupied theorists, scholars, librarians, artists, and archivists for as many decades as Ruscha and his team have been photographing Los Angeles streets. At its core, the Streets of Los Angeles project activates what Allan Sekula described in his essay “The Body and the Archive” (1986) as “the fundamental problem of the archive,” namely “the problem of volume.” As soon as Ruscha drove his vehicle beyond the physical and temporal confines of the 1966 Sunset Strip, he ignited an accumulative endeavor that, lacking a logical endpoint, could theoretically burn on forever. But is the outcome of Ruscha’s undertaking actually an archive and, if so, by what definition and on whose terms? Situating the Streets of Los Angeles within archival theory and practice, the authors in this section demonstrate how applying this terminology to Ruscha’s project expands the interdisciplinary value of its images and prompts the rethinking of standard archival definitions and practices.
A main theme of this section is the role of digital technology in transforming Ruscha’s reels of 35mm negatives into images that can be seen, sorted, and searched. The authors all examine how questions of information—its creation, storage, and retrieval—that are integral to Ruscha’s artistic practice play out in the creation and digitization of the enormous Streets of Los Angeles corpus. Recognizing how the large scale of the project tests the underlying assumptions and limits of archival work, Emily Pugh and Susan Laxton offer divergent perspectives on how digitization either complements or contradicts Ruscha’s artistic motivations. Zooming in on the details that photographic and digital technologies make visible, Kate Palmer Albers charts a path through Ruscha’s Streets that explores how words become images and vice versa. The artist’s long-standing interest in language provides the kernel of a critical investigation of contemporary computer vision algorithms and the presences and absence they encode. Connecting sight, language, knowledge, and memory, the “Archive” section suggests how, in our current era of mass digitization, the archive is becoming a technology of vision that shapes how we see the past in the present.