Full Description
In
1966, Ed Ruscha drove a car rigged with a motorized camera to
capture Los Angeles' most iconic street: Sunset Boulevard. Navigating the
boulevard, he created a time capsule of its famed facades, beginning an
almost 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 some of Los Angeles's most
iconic sites while also capturing the tapestry of everyday life-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 dynamic data visualizations, the authors consider what it means
to interpret an archive mostly accessible through digital technologies and
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 (TM), a multiformat publishing
tool from Getty. The free online edition of this open-access publication is
available at getty.edu/publications/scores/ and includes video, data
visualizations, and zoomable illustrations. Free PDF and EPUB downloads of the book are also available.
