Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles

Making Ed Ruscha’s photo archive publicly accessible for the first time

Project Details

Overexposed photograph of cars in the foreground with palm trees in the background.

Photographs of Sunset and Hollywood Boulevard (detail), 1965-2010, photo by Ed Ruscha. Negative frame from 35 mm film reel. Getty Research Institute, 2012.M.1. © Ed Ruscha

About

Goal

By digitizing five decades of Ed Ruscha’s photographic project to document the streets of Los Angeles, the Getty Research Institute provides a crucial, publicly available resource to researchers of history, art, and architecture. Through an ongoing research initiative with external scholars, the project also contributes to current discourses in digital art history. It situates Streets of Los Angeles archive within various historical frameworks, highlighting what it can tell us about modern art, architecture, and the changing physical, social, and cultural landscapes of Los Angeles.

Outcomes

  • A peer-reviewed digital publication, Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles: City, Archive, Image, Artist, which contextualizes Ruscha’s archive as an extension of his artistic practice and includes sixteen original scholarly essays, data visualizations, and two multimedia artist projects (forthcoming fall 2024)
  • 12 Sunsets, an interactive website allowing users to access and explore Ruscha’s digitized shoots of Sunset Boulevard
  • The digitization of over 140,000 negatives from the archive

Background

Project Team

Resources