In 1966, Ed Ruscha drove a car rigged with a motorized camera to capture Los Angeles’ most iconic street: Sunset Boulevard. He created a time capsule of its famed facades, beginning a sixty-year-long commitment to documenting the changing urban landscape of postwar Los Angeles. The Streets of Los Angeles project that comprises these photographs is likely the most comprehensive artistic record of any city, with over 900,000 images of major thoroughfares. Ruscha’s photographs constitute an unparalleled visual chronicle of both iconic and everyday sites in L.A., including popular music venues, neighborhood restaurants, and billboards promoting Hollywood’s latest blockbusters.

In this volume, scholars from disciplines such as urban planning, cultural geography, architecture, art history, and musicology explore the Streets of Los Angeles Archive as a rich repository for analyzing Ruscha’s practice and the city’s visual culture. Using his photographs and new data visualizations, the authors consider what it means to interpret an archive mostly accessible through digital technologies, and they demonstrate how histories of art have been indelibly reshaped since the advent of the information age in the 1960s.

This publication was created using Quire™, a multiformat publishing tool from Getty. The free online edition of this open-access publication is available at www.getty.edu/publications/ruscha/ and includes video, data visualizations, and zoomable illustrations. Free PDF and EPUB downloads of the book are also available.

• PROJECT, Zanna Gilbert and Emily Pugh
  • 1. Introduction, Andrew Perchuk, Zanna Gilbert, and Emily Pugh
  • 2. Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles: A Narrative History, Zanna Gilbert and Jennifer Quick
  • 3. Archiving the Archive: Processing the Streets of Los Angeles Photographs, Beth Ann Guynn, David Newbury, and Lily Pregill
  • 4. Seeing the System: Data Visualization as Critical Practice, Emily Pugh and Eric Rodenbeck
• ARTIST, Zanna Gilbert
  • 5. No Design: The Streets Photographs and Ruscha’s Books, Jennifer Quick
  • 6. Information Man, Andrew Perchuk
  • 7. “Almost Too Hot to Handle”: Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Alyce Mahon
  • 8. Disruption and Recursion: On Ruscha’s Criticality, Margaret Iversen
• IMAGE, Isabel Frampton Wade
  • 9. Seeing the Strip: The Photographic Archives of J. B. Jackson, Ed Ruscha, and Denise Scott Brown, Britt Salvesen
  • 10. “The Tyranny of the Glossy”: Commercial Architectural Photography and Ruscha’s Streets, Isabel Frampton Wade
  • 11. Ed Ruscha’s Street Photos and the Cinematic Sequence Shot, Mark Shiel
  • 12. Nightmare of Information: Ed Ruscha’s Image Critique, Eva Ehninger
• ARCHIVE, Tracy Stuber
  • 13. Some Los Angeles Streets: Ed Ruscha in the Library and Archive, Emily Pugh
  • 14. Mnemopolis, Susan Laxton
  • 15. From Banks to Blanks: The Poetic Spaces of Automated Vision, Kate Palmer Albers
• CITY, Emily Pugh
  • 16. Now Before Then: Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles Project and the Anticipation of an Archive, Amy Murphy
  • 17. Streets of Another Los Angeles: Geographies of Exclusion and Difference, Eric Avila
  • 18. Ed Ruscha’s Street-Level View and the Postwar Redevelopment Vernacular, Francesca Russello Ammon, Brian D. Goldstein, and Garrett Dash Nelson
  • 19. An Urban Grammar for the Streets of Los Angeles Archive: Types and Town Watching in the Arterial Datascape, Gabrielle Esperdy, with contributions by Damon Crockett
  • 20. Songs for Every Address: The Music of Ed Ruscha’s Photographs, Josh Kun
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• CONTRIBUTORS

Andrew Perchuk is deputy director of the Getty Research Institute.

Zanna Gilbert is a senior research specialist at the Getty Research Institute.

Emily Pugh is a principal research specialist at the Getty Research Institute.

Kate Palmer Albers is associate professor of art history and visual culture at Whittier College.

Francesca Russello Ammon is an urban and planning historian and associate professor of city and regional planning and historic preservation at the University of Pennsylvania.

Eric Avila is professor of history, Chicana/o studies, and urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Damon Crockett is a data scientist in the Lens Media Lab at Yale University’s Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage.

Eva Ehninger is director of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg, Centre for Advanced Study inherit. heritage in transformation and professor for modern art history at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Germany.

Gabrielle Esperdy is an architectural and urban historian and dean of the Hillier College of Architecture and Design at New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Brian D. Goldstein is an architectural and urban historian and associate professor of art history at Swarthmore College.

Beth Ann Guynn is a Special Collections archivist at the Getty Research Institute.

Margaret Iversen is professor emerita in the history of art at the University of Essex, England.

Josh Kun is professor and chair of cross-cultural communication at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Susan Laxton is associate professor of modernism and the history of photography at the University of California, Riverside.

Alyce Mahon is professor of modern and contemporary art history and a fellow of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge.

Amy Murphy is associate professor and associate dean of Faculty Affairs at the University of Southern California School of Architecture.

Garrett Dash Nelson is a historical geographer, and president and head curator at the Leventhal Map and Education Center at Boston Public Library.

David Newbury is senior director of public technologies at Getty Digital.

Lily Pregill is collection platforms director at Getty Digital.

Jennifer Quick is an independent scholar based in Brooklyn, New York.

Eric Rodenbeck is the founder and creative director of Stamen, a data visualization design studio in San Francisco.

Britt Salvesen is the curator and head of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department and the Prints and Drawings Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Mark Shiel is professor of film, media, and urban studies at King’s College London.

Tracy Stuber is a digital humanities specialist for Arts and Humanities Research Computing at Harvard University.

Isabel Frampton Wade is a Dornsife Postdoctoral Fellow in General Education at the University of Southern California.