Ed Ruscha Photographing Los Angeles

Our brief discussion in class last week about the layout of war photographs in Life got me thinking more about the presentation of photographs. We’re accustomed to seeing photographs in museums framed and lit as if they were paintings, but many artists have also used photography to experiment with collage and the artist’s book. One of my favorite examples of the latter is Ed Ruscha’s clever play on the photographic panorama, Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966). The book’s title is meant literally, with every building on a 1.5 mile span of Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles delineated in the accordion-style book (27 feet long when flattened out). The images running along the top and bottom of the frame represent the two sides of the street, and the numbers under the photographs correspond with the street address. See below for an image of the full book and a photographic reproduction of several pages flattened out.

Ruscha was one of several West Coast artists who helped usher photography into the realm of conceptual art in the 1960s and 1970s (for Ruscha, this move meant blurring the distinction between photography’s artistic and scientific uses). In Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Ruscha takes up several aspects of photography that we covered this semester. The literal quality of Ruscha’s photographs wittily refigures the ontological confusion between the photograph and its referent (much discussed in the Tim Schlak and Joan Schwartz articles) as well photography’s use as a surrogate for travel. One of the central ironies of Ruscha’s piece is that the actual appearance of Los Angeles’s Sunset Strip hardly lives up to its name and mystique. This disjuncture is heightened by Ruscha’s pointed use of black-and-white film.

Ruscha also works from the tradition described in Phyllis Lambert’s essay, “Photographic Documentation and Buildings: Relationships Past and Present,” but here the emphasis is less on documenting the buildings themselves than activating the panoramic point-of-view. Ruscha’s book indicates that the only way to really “see” the Sunset Strip is by car. In his 1971 appreciation of Los Angeles’ “autotopia,” architecture critic Reyner Banham observed how in Los Angeles “The actual experience of driving on the freeways prints itself deeply on the conscious mind and unthinking reflexes.” Where Eadweard Muybridge ascended one of the highest points in San Francisco for his famous 1877-1878 panoramas, Ruscha simply snapped the driver’s side view.

The book formatting also means that, as opposed to a single photographic print, Every Building on the Sunset Strip does not give you the illusion of being able to see everything once. Los Angeles has long been understood as a place that resists being understood as a coherent whole; unlike most cities, there’s no obvious center, no defining point of view. The horizontality of Ruscha’s book reflects this same expansive conception of space. There’s something paradoxical in thinking of photographic panoramas like Every Building on the Sunset Strip as a single frozen moment of time since the piece is produced by stitching many adjacent photographs and moments.  Muybridge masterfully elided this illusion, but Ruscha allows the jags between exposures to be strikingly noticeable, not only in the folds of the page but also in the way people and cars are cut off at the frame line.

In her essay, “‘Records of Simple Truth and Precision’: Photography, Archives, and the Illusion of Control,” Schwartz invokes the early photography enthusiast Marcus Aurelius Root’s writing: “[He suggests] that the photograph was not only a substitute for first-hand experience, but that, in some instances, it was even possible to achieve a ‘completer and truer’ understanding through photographic witnessing than by direct observation.” Compare this with critic Peter Schjeldahl’s observation that Every Building on the Sunset Strip “gives a missing present-ness, a simultaneity, to an entity that otherwise can exist only through time, the time it takes a car to traverse the Strip.” Forty-five years after Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Ruscha’s vision of photography as a composited approximation of reality rather than a fixed representation has reached a strange kind of apotheosis in Google’s Street View (the last time I checked, Google's view of the Sunset Strip is sunny).