The Streets of Los Angeles (SoLA) project is a decades-long part of Ed Ruscha’s artistic practice and process. In 1965, Ruscha began a photographic campaign for his artist book Every Building on the Sunset Strip. Almost a decade later, in 1973, Ruscha began documenting the L.A. area again, transforming the discrete project of Every Building into an ongoing activity that continues to this day. The resulting photographic archive has since become the backbone of Ruscha’s engagement with L.A.’s urban fabric and its socio-urban developments. Though Ruscha doesn’t consider the archive an artwork, it provides source material for many of his celebrated works: Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), the Course of Empire series (2005), and the Metro Plots series (late 1990s), to name just a few. The majority of the photographic archive, however, remains unused—what Jennifer Quick calls an “image morgue”—raising questions about the archive’s latency, utility, and status: a major theme in the “Artist” section of this book.
These essays explore how new knowledge about the SoLA Archive both challenges and redefines the understanding of Ruscha’s career and oeuvre. The artist’s relationship to design, photography, information—and to the city of Los Angeles—is newly interrogated. Quick examines how the artist’s technical knowledge and training in graphic design resulted in his unique “no design” aesthetic. Margaret Iversen pushes back against the characterization of Ruscha’s work as “deadpan” to reveal the darker modes of criticality in his books and photodocumentation. Andrew Perchuk focuses on the seemingly unlimited information available among the “noise” of the SoLA photographs and the potential meanings and messages yet to be discovered. And Alyce Mahon highlights the tension between art and documentation in Every Building on the Sunset Strip. All the authors take singular positions on Ruscha’s engagement with information and communication, but they each draw out the excessive, nonrational, and obsessive nature of Ruscha’s work in relation to the SoLA Archive.