Ed Ruscha's Streets of Los Angeles

In1966, Ed Ruscha drove a car rigged with a motorized camera tocapture Los Angeles' most iconic street: Sunset Boulevard. Navigating theboulevard, he created a time capsule of its famed facades, beginning analmost sixty-year-long commitment to documenting the changing urban landscapeof postwar Los Angeles. The Streets of Los Angeles Project that comprisesthese photographs is likely the most comprehensive artistic record of anycity, with over 900,000 images of major thoroughfares. Ruscha's photographsconstitute an unparalleled visual chronicle of some of Los Angeles's mosticonic sites while also capturing the tapestry of everyday life-popular musicvenues, neighborhood restaurants, and billboards promoting Hollywood's latestblockbusters. In this volume, scholars from disciplines such as urban planning, cultural geography,architecture, art history, and musicology explore the Streets of Los AngelesArchive as a rich repository for analyzing Ruscha's practice and the city's visualculture. Using hisphotographs and dynamic data visualizations, the authors consider what it meansto interpret an archive mostly accessible through digital technologies anddemonstrate how histories of art have been indelibly reshaped since theadvent of the information age in the 1960s.This publication was created using Quire (TM), a multiformat publishingtool from Getty. The free online edition of this open-access publication isavailable at getty.edu/publications/scores/ and includes video, datavisualizations, and zoomable illustrations. Free PDF and EPUB downloads of the book are also available.