16. April 2024
Photo: Screenshot from “Ed Ruscha - Streets of Los Angeles” at Vimeo
A short video produced in collaboration with the MoMA exhibition ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN, now on display at LACMA, explores Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles archive, which was acquired by the Getty Research Institute in 2012 and is in the process of being digitized and made publicly accessible.
Although the Chocolate Room installation grabbed our attention the most in ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN at MoMA last year, Ruscha's appeal with architects is usually found in his photographs of urban places. Most famous is Every Building on the Sunset Strip, the artist book he made in 1966 by mounting a motorized camera to a pick-up truck. Far from a one-off project, Ruscha has returned to Sunset Boulevard and other Los Angeles streets for nearly 60 years, becoming a documentarian of the city's evolution. That evolution is more pronounced in the Getty's digitization of the hundreds of thousands of negatives he has taken, as explained in this excellent short film directed by Matthew Miller and posted to Vimeo: