Ruscha (Edward) Photographs, 1974-2010

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Summary

Title:
Edward Ruscha photographs of Los Angeles streets
Dates:
1974-2010
Creators:
Ruscha, Edward
Abstract:
The archive comprises Edward Ruscha's ongoing photographic documentation of Los Angeles thoroughfares. Included are shoots of three streets made in the 1970s: Santa Monica Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway, 1974; and Melrose Avenue, 1975; and over 40 shoots made since 2007. These shoots represent more than twenty-five streets including Sepulveda, Pico, Olympic, Wilshire, La Cienega, and Beverly boulevards.
Extent:
35 Linear Feet, 28 boxes, and 58 GB (3,827 files)
Language:
Collection material is in English.
Preferred citation:

Edward Ruscha Photographs of Los Angeles Streets, 1974-2010, Getty Research Institute, Research Library, Accession no. 2012.M.2.

http://hdl.handle.net/10020/cifa2012m2

Background

Scope and content:

The collection comprises Edward Ruscha's ongoing photographic documentation of Los Angeles thoroughfares. This material demonstrates Ruscha's interest in producing an almost comprehensive representation of the city's main streets. Included are shoots of three streets made in the 1970s: Santa Monica Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway, 1974; and Melrose Avenue, 1975; and over 40 streets shot since 2007. These later shoots represent more than twenty-five streets including Sepulveda, Pico, Olympic, Wilshire, La Cienega, and Beverly Boulevards. Some shoots record groups or "suites" of streets such as the Chinatown, La Brea, and Silverlake areas.

The shoots from the 1970s are represented primarily by strip negatives and corresponding [?] contact sheets (approximately 10,500 negatives and circa 100 contact sheets containing approximately 9,800 frames). Documentation consists primarily of relevant pages photocopied from the production notebooks found in box 7 of the Getty Research Institute's companion collection, Edward Ruscha Photographs of Sunset Boulevard and Hollywood Boulevard, 1965-2000, accession number 2012.R.1.

From 2007 onward, Ruscha generally documented a street in two shoots, usually two single days or two periods of two days or periods of consecutive days. Each shoot is represented by a negative reel (49 reels total). The two negative reels for each street were then combined by the Los Angeles film lab FotoKem in a single positive reel (24 reels total).

Documentation for each shoot consists primarily of cue and footage sheets and invoices from the FotoKem labs.

Biographical / historical:

The American artist Edward Joseph Ruscha IV was born in Omaha, Nebraska on December 16, 1937 to Edward Ruscha III, an insurance auditor, and his wife Dorothy Driscoll Ruscha. He was raised in Oklahoma City where he met his lifelong friends Mason Williams, Joe Goode, and Jerry McMillan. After graduation from high school he drove to California with Mason Williams to attend Chouinard Art Institute (now California Institute of the Arts). Robert Irwin and Emerson Woelffer were among the teachers who would have an especially strong influence on him.

Ruscha graduated from Chouinard in 1960 and in 1961 made his first trip to Europe, traveling with his mother and older sister Shelby by car for seven months. The numerous travel images he took with his Yashika camera that include storefronts, window displays, and billboards, as well as the perhaps more typical images of people they met on their journey, thematically and stylistically prefigure the photographs he was soon to take for his early artist's books such as Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) and Some Los Angeles Apartments (1965).

A visit to New York on his way back to California opened Ruscha's eyes to Pop Art, and the work he subsequently created was included in New Painting of Common Objects, the first exhibition of Pop Art, curated by Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1962. The following year Hopps gave Ruscha his first solo show at Ferus Gallery. Informed by Pop Art and the distinctive billboard culture of Los Angeles, Ruscha went on to become a pivitol presence in the West Coast and Conceptual art scenes.

Although much of Ruscha's work is informed by or uses photography as its point of departure, he sees himself not as a photographer but as someone who uses the medium of photography as part of his larger artistic practice. His early photographic artist's books, many of which further distill the quotidian elements of the Los Angeles cityscape - parking lots, urban streets, and apartment buildings - into serial imagery, have fundamentally altered the genre of the artist's book through their use of photography and commercial production methods. Yet in a discussion of his artist's books with Silvia Wolf, Ruscha noted, "My use of the camera is still a tool to make a picture...At the time I was into making pictures that happened to be photographs, rather than making 'photographs' ("Nostalgia and New Editions; A Converstion with Ed Ruscha," in Ed Ruscha and Photography, 2004, p. 257).

Known for the drawings and paintings of words and phrases that he began making in the 1960s, as well as for his artist's books, Ruscha is one of the pre-eminent artists of his generation. He has exhibited widely in the United States and abroad. His first international exhibition was in Cologne at Galerie Rudolf Zwirner in 1968. A few years later he began showing at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, and his first retrospective was held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1982. He is currently represented by Gagosian Gallery (Los Angeles and New York).

Acquisition information:
Promised gift of Ed Ruscha.
Appraisal information:

Duplicate born digital files were not retained in this collection in accordance with the Library's digital preservation and privacy policies.

Processing information:

Processed by Beth Ann Guynn and Linda Kleiger in 2012, and Guynn wrote the finding aid. Born digital materials were processed by Laura Schroffel in 2017 and 2019. Some filenames were edited for disambiguation. Original filenames were retained as labels in the Research Collections Viewer.

Arrangement:

The collection is arranged chronologically by shoot date.

Physical location:
Request access to the physical materials described in this inventory through the catalog record for this collection. Click here for the access policy.

About this collection guide

Collection Guide Author:
Beth Ann Guynn
Date Encoded:
This finding aid was produced using ArchivesSpace on 2024-10-16 11:19:47 -0700 .

Access and use

Restrictions:

Open for use by qualified researchers. Original film negative and positive reels are unavailable due to conservation concerns; these materials have been digitized.

Terms of access:

Contact Library Reproductions and Permissions.

Preferred citation:

Edward Ruscha Photographs of Los Angeles Streets, 1974-2010, Getty Research Institute, Research Library, Accession no. 2012.M.2.

http://hdl.handle.net/10020/cifa2012m2

Location of this collection:
1200 Getty Center Drive, Suite 1100
Los Angeles, CA 90049-1688, US
Contact:
(310) 440-7390
Website