At its genesis in 1965, Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles (SoLA) project was very much of its moment. The photographs reflect the perspective of an artist living at the nexus of several intersecting trends—including the continuation of the city’s postwar boom and the rapid expansion of mass media and communication technologies as well as their related industries—many of which had a significant presence in Los Angeles. The SoLA images now span six decades, exist in multiple formats, and document the continual evolution of streets throughout the metropolitan area. As Amy Murphy’s essay effectively demonstrates, these images reveal the ways that the urban fabric of L.A. was shaped and reshaped by the same political, economic, and social forces that Ruscha’s project thematizes.
Much of the urban, architectural, and cultural changes to L.A. since the 1960s are recorded in the SoLA photographs in both direct and indirect ways. Ultimately, however, this is Ruscha’s Los Angeles. While many L.A. neighborhoods are included, numerous others are excluded, such as South Los Angeles, Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles, and the San Fernando Valley. Moreover, the images of placid streets in which relatively few people or cars appear (especially in the earlier shoots) provide a skewed picture of Los Angeles during a time of protest and tension in the city. Eric Avila and Josh Kun focus on the communities and geographies not captured by Ruscha’s camera, reminding us that the SoLA project, despite being large in scope, is by no means comprehensive.
Acknowledging both its vastness and its limitations, several essays in the “City” section engage with the SoLA Archive as a document of not only urban form and change but also stasis. First Francesca Ammon, Brian Goldstein, and Garrett Dash Nelson, and then Gabrielle Esperdy, examine how these images and their related data sets can be used as a resource for investigating the growth and development of L.A. in terms of not only architecture and urban planning but also social, economic, and cultural change. These authors consider both the potential and the limitations of the archive, and they contend with what it means to use these photographs as documents and as data. These authors’ essays respond to the question of how scholars might leverage the potential of over fifty years of photographic documentation of L.A. while recognizing that the SoLA Archive is the work of an artist with his own agenda and point of view. In doing so, these authors explore themes of objectivity versus subjectivity and how information is transformed into knowledge. They observe how these photographs provide insight into the use of urban space as a domain of cultural production and a site for staging resistance, communicating artistic expression, and building community. They also interrogate the nature of data: how it is created, used, and reused; how it circulates; what it represents, and to whom.
By using the SoLA Archive as a starting point for a reflection on Los Angeles and its development, the authors in this section articulate how the shifts that were just beginning in the mid-1960s have since played out in the city’s urban environment, both inside and outside of Ruscha’s frame.