Every Building on the Sunset Strip

This artists' book was created by American artist Ed Ruscha. During the 1960s and 1970s, Ruscha created a series of photographic books featuring banal subject matter such as interstate gas stations, empty swimming pools, and vacant parking lots. Informed by the principles of conceptual art, which privileged ideas over aesthetics, Ruscha’s work points towards photographs' ubiquity within twentieth-century visual culture as carriers of information rather than as aesthetic objects. By taking banal informational images and inserting them into contexts such as the art gallery and the art book, Ruscha prompts us to consider how such photographs can become art. With its repetitive structure and mundane subject matter, Every Building on the Sunset Strip is closely related to the NE Thing Co's Portfolio of Piles.

Bruce Peel Special Collections houses six of Ruscha's photographic books including Every Building on the Sunset Strip (featured here), A Few Palm Trees, Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles, and Real Estate Opportunities.