In Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), a documentary about filmmaking in the city, the director, Thom Andersen, claims that Los Angeles is both the “most photographed city in the world” and the place where “the relation between reality and representation gets muddled.” Conjured through decades of experimentation in film, photography, and other media, the image of Los Angeles often oscillates between extremes: it is at once the United States’ best city—the place of sunshine, dreams, and Hollywood—and its worst—the site of endless urban sprawl, earthquakes, and gridlocked freeways. This section addresses Ed Ruscha’s complex relationship with the image of Los Angeles and its environs, and how he negotiates this relationship through photography. The essay authors highlight a diverse group of architects, urbanists, and artists who were studying L.A. during a period of major urban upheaval that included uprisings, school walkouts, and protests related to war and racial oppression.
Many critics have accused Ruscha of being disinterested in photography and have described his photographs as “deadpan” or sardonic; this section reveals the constellation of people, professions, and theories that Ruscha was in dialogue with. Britt Salvesen compares Ruscha to two of his contemporaries in urban studies, Denise Scott Brown and J. B. Jackson, and explores their shared working approach to documenting the urban landscape. In my essay, I turn our attention to the field of commercial architectural photography to show that artists and photographers, whose professional status and methodological approach may initially appear dissimilar, in fact used the medium to examine what it meant to create a portrait of the urban landscape. The trials and errors involved in Ruscha’s process of photographing Sunset Boulevard were quite similar to how both architectural photographers and filmmakers experimented with representing the city’s buildings and urban landscape during this period. Further expanding the contexts of the Streets of Los Angeles Archive, Mark Shiel brings Ruscha’s photography from the 1960s and 1970s into conversation with contemporaneous cinema, homing in on theories about the sequence shot to investigate how Ruscha used lesser-known cinematic methodologies to capture city streets.
While we learn much from how Ruscha’s work dialogues with parallel fields, his photography also gives a new perspective on how photographers, artists, and urbanists use images as information and rely on photography as a tool for knowledge production. Eva Ehninger broadens the scope of this section to show how Ruscha produced a timely critique of images as supposedly neutral transmitters of information. Throughout his career, Ruscha has questioned how art conveys meaning; he developed this practice, Ehninger argues, through photography. Each author interrogates the multiple meanings and media that the term image is attached to and shows how photography has been constitutive in both representing the myth of Los Angeles’ image and disclosing its realities.