Project 1 Introduction

“To Ed: Sunset will never be the same again.”

The above dedication was taken from a message written in the margin of a contact sheet from Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles (SoLA) project, which has amassed over 900,000 photographs of major Los Angeles thoroughfares since it began in 1965.¹ The majority of these images—around 740,000²—are now housed at the Getty Research Institute (GRI) as the Streets of Los Angeles Archive.³ Appearing in the context of Ruscha’s expansive photography project that initially produced his well-known book Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), the message reminds us of the fundamental duality of city streets, representing both permanence and impermanence as well as the role photography can play in freezing a moment in time.

Written in 1966, the margin note foretells the mythic status Ruscha’s book would eventually take on. However, this is just one of the many sets of contradictions that are provoked by Ruscha’s SoLA Archive: It is vast, but in its focus on mostly the west side of Los Angeles, it is not comprehensive.⁴ It is a trove of information that resists easy or straightforward translation into knowledge. It is, in archivists’ terms, both a collection and an archive,⁵ since it represents the vision of a particular artist and, due to the methodical, documentary-like approach that produced it, provides access to broader histories of Los Angeles and its built environment. With Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles: Artist, Image, Archive, City, we seek to both expose and explore these contradictions. Rather than offering a definitive statement on the SoLA Archive, the texts in this volume begin to reveal its complexities and suggest the ambiguities its existence presents for understanding the entire oeuvre of Ruscha as well as the postwar history of Los Angeles.

That Ruscha had amassed an archive focused on the streets of Los Angeles was little known before the GRI’s acquisition of it in 2011; thus, the project and the photographs have barely been accounted for in Ruscha scholarship.⁶ One notable exception in this regard is the work of Jennifer Quick. She discusses the SoLA project in her article “Pasteup Pictures: Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip,” and she insightfully uses the existence of Ruscha’s notebooks and materials related to the project’s production (all of which are contained in the archive) to reevaluate Ruscha’s practice from this perspective.⁷ Quick’s research notwithstanding, Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles presents an excellent opportunity to reassess Ruscha’s oeuvre in the light of the SoLA Archive.

While Ruscha’s relationship to Los Angeles has been explored by other authors (most notably, Ken D. Allan, Alexandra Schwartz, and Cécile Whiting),⁸ this publication goes further by presenting a multifaceted approach to the topic. Specifically, the essays in this volume investigate the intersecting points between Ruscha, photography, architecture, information theory, and urban planning in the postwar period that emerge only through an interdisciplinary excavation of the archive. It should be noted that Ruscha is, of course, not the only artist to have documented Los Angeles extensively.⁹ Thus, while this book is in many ways centered on Ruscha, its authors seek to place him in the wider network of practice, thought, and representation.

Ruscha’s project nevertheless remains distinct from most of his twentieth-century contemporaries precisely because of the motorization and semiautomation of the photography process.¹⁰ Embedded in Ruscha’s images are multiple versions of Los Angeles, offering numerous avenues of inquiry. Thus, this publication has two fundamental aims: first, to account for the size and scope of what this archive documents and the insights it could offer to multiple fields while acknowledging it as the work of a single artist; and second, to consider the influence the computational approaches used to process the archive will inevitably have on the research and scholarship produced from it. To confront these challenges, we seek to position Ruscha’s SoLA Archive as being at once a product of and about technologies of information assembly, management, reproduction, and distribution, using the format of a digital publication to do so.

The scholarship presented in this publication was facilitated by a research project that has been active at Getty for the last several years. In 2017, we issued a call for proposals inviting expressions of interest in working with the SoLA Archive from a wide range of fields, including but not limited to digital humanities, cultural geography, architecture, art history, photography, and visual culture.¹¹ We were able to organize several workshops for the selected international participants, many of whom have now produced scholarship for this book.¹² While the essays have their own distinct viewpoints and arguments to make, they are also interconnected, reflecting in part the dialogue that was encouraged by the multiyear research project the books’ contributors collaborated on together.

The publication is structured into five parts: “Project,” “Artist,” “Image,” “Archive,” and “City.” Throughout these sections, the contributors examine the work of Ruscha and the SoLA Archive as he created it as well as the myriad information workflows and processes that the archive both thematizes and was subjected to upon its arrival at Getty in 2012. Such an approach is, we argue, vitally important. Ruscha’s impressive undertaking has far-reaching consequences for how scholars think about artistic projects and photographic archives in the information age and about the relationships between structures of, for example, economic and political power and the systems and institutions that produce and manage information related to art, architectural history, and cultural heritage.

Given the publication’s themes, along with the size and scale of the SoLA Archive, the format of a digital publication seemed an ideal way to present our contributors’ arguments. Furthermore, our publishing methodology is focused on connecting the format of the publication with its content; in other words, our goal is to develop a publication that is in dialogue with the innovative digital technologies used to create it. Using this approach, we argue, is a means of engaging critically with the various technologies we are using, as opposed to using them as mere tools. While there are considerable challenges to publishing scholarly monographs in digital formats, Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles is a prime example of why such challenges are worth contending with. The digital format provides ways to convey the breadth of the archive and the scholarship assessing it that are more engaging and effective than print alone would be. Publishing a book in Quire, Getty’s digital publication framework, offered us yet another way to assess how digital and material forms of information are shaping and reshaping histories of art.

Recently, Ruscha’s team has produced a digital video of what was Chavez Ravine, the historically Mexican neighborhood that was violently displaced in the 1950s to build Dodger Stadium. Ruscha’s interest in this landmark may stem from the social upheaval created by its construction and the complete transformation of this part of Los Angeles. Indeed, over the last sixty years, Ruscha has documented the city and the human impact on its land, providing a record of continuity, disruption, revision, and accumulation. The expanding timeframe of his project, as well as the broader purview of its geographic scope, help bring the history of the American West into clearer focus, drawing attention to the longer history of L.A., which stretches back to the founding of El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula on the land also known as Tovaangar, the home of the Gabrieleño/Tongva people.

The future of Los Angeles was dramatically changed in January 2025, when several areas were destroyed by major fires, including the portion of Sunset Boulevard that runs through Pacific Palisades. The epigraph has taken on a new meaning. Now, Sunset can never be the same again. Ruscha’s project, however, will continue as a resource for what was lost and what Sunset will eventually become.

1. Ruscha’s studio team is still photographing the city’s streets, so the project’s total number of images continues to grow. The number of images (negatives, contact strips, etc.) in the archive is estimated—no one has done a physical count of them. The occasional fluctuation of the figures over time on Getty’s website is symptomatic of the scale of the archive. The artist has promised to donate all SoLA material to Getty. For more discussion in this publication on the archive’s scale, see the “Archive” section and “You Are Here: Locating the SoLA Archive.” ↩︎

2. Of the approximately 740,000 images, almost 130,000 have been digitized. ↩︎

3. Ruscha’s project should be distinguished from the archive as accessioned in 2012 by the GRI. Ruscha’s photographs are contained in two archives based on the streets they document, but for the purposes of this volume, they are collectively referred to as the Streets of Los Angeles Archive: see Edward Ruscha Photographs of Sunset Boulevard and Hollywood Boulevard, 1965–2010, 2012.M.1, https://www.getty.edu/research/collections/collection/100001; and Edward Ruscha Photographs of Los Angeles Streets, 1974–2010, 2012.M.2, https://www.getty.edu/research/collections/collection/100071. ↩︎

4. Ruscha’s project encompasses not only Los Angeles proper but also the cities of Malibu, West Hollywood, and Beverly Hills. For the purposes of this book, “Los Angeles” is inclusive of these cities. For more on where Ruscha did and didn’t photograph, see the “City” section of this volume and “You Are Here.” ↩︎

5. For the definitions of archive and collection, see the website of the Society of American Archivists: https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/archive.html and https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/collection.html. ↩︎

6. Scholarship on Ruscha’s photographs has mostly focused on his photobooks. See Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (Winter 1990): 105–43; Thomas Crow, The Long March of Pop: Art, Music, and Design, 1930–1995 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016); Jaleh Mansoor, “Ed Ruscha’s ‘One-Way Street,’” October 111 (Winter 2005): 127–42; and Sylvia Wolf, Ed Ruscha and Photography, exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2004). ↩︎

7. Jennifer Quick, “Pasteup Pictures: Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip,” Art Bulletin 100, no. 2 (2018): 125–52, https://doi.org/10.1080/00043079.2018.1393327. ↩︎

8. See, in addition, Ken Allan, “Ed Ruscha, Pop Art, and Spectatorship in 1960s Los Angeles,” Art Bulletin 92, no. 3 (2010): 231–49; Alexandra Schwartz, Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010); and Cécile Whiting, Pop L.A.: Art and the City in the 1960s, rev. ed. (2006; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). ↩︎

9. Julius Shulman, Robert Flick, Harry Drinkwater, Camilo José Vergara, Anthony Hernandez, Judy Fiskin, Alan Sekula, and Guadalupe Rosales are just a few artists that Ruscha’s work resonates with. There are several commercial photography archives containing significant documentation of Los Angeles, its architecture, and its streets throughout the twentieth century, including the Dick Whittington Studio Collection of Negatives and Photographs, held at the Huntington Library, and the Julius Shulman Photography Archive, 1935–2009, held at the GRI (http://hdl.handle.net/10020/cifa2004r10). However, these are archives of commissioned assignments, not photographic campaigns to represent the city as part archival and part artistic project, as Ruscha’s is. ↩︎

10. See Zanna Gilbert and Jennifer Quick, “Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles: A Narrative History,” this volume, for more information on the technological aspects of the project. ↩︎

11. See Getty Research Institute, “Call for Proposals,” https://www.getty.edu/research/scholars/digital_art_history/pdfs/gri_ruscha_proposals.pdf. ↩︎

12. The workshops took place in January 2019, January 2020, August 2020, October 2020, and February 2021. The January 2020 workshop, funded by the Terra Foundation, allowed us to explore the possibilities of a digital publication for this project. ↩︎