ISBN: HB: 9781606061381

Getty Publications

March 2013

100 pp.

26,1x20,6 cm

11 colour illus., 56 duatones illus.

HB:
£21.99
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Ed Ruscha and Some Los Angeles Apartments

This is a superbly illustrated look at the evolution of the photographic work of Ed Ruscha – the quintessential Los Angeles artist. Los-Angeles based contemporary artist Ed Ruscha is celebrated for his paintings, drawings, prints, and artist's books, receiving widespread critical acclaim for more than half a century. Capturing the quintessential Los Angeles experience with its balance of the banal and beautiful, his photobooks of the 1960s – such as "Twenty Six Gasoline Stations" and "Some Los Angeles Apartments" – are known for their deadpan cataloguing of the city's functional architecture. This volume features 38 Ruscha plates and an essay that traces the evolution of the artist's thinking about his photographs initially as the means to end, and eventually as works of art in and of themselves.

About the author

Virginia Heckert is associate curator in the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum and author of the bestselling "Irving Penn: Small Trades".

Reviews

"A slim but essential volume... As such examples of mid-century design disappear or fall into disrepair, the utilitarian clarity of these images make a book like 'Some Los Angeles Apartments' a valuable document, and an unexpectedly moving one. What began as a perhaps ironic concept has, with the passing years, taken on the resonance of something lost to history" – Spectrum Culture