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Picturing Distance: Ed Ruscha's Los Angeles Photobooks
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 February 2020
Abstract
Ed Ruscha's photobooks create a deliberate type of low-key provocation the artist has referred to as a type of “Huh?” – a presentation of the American landscape in a book format that makes it very difficult to locate unambiguous cues for meaning or clear affect in the photographs. This essay lays out an extended reading of the notion of “distance” as uniting these photobooks in their physicality, in the ways in which the postwar industrial landscape of Los Angeles is presented to the viewer obliquely, and in the cooled manner of affect that was so influential for later artists.
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- Information
- Journal of American Studies , Volume 54 , Special Issue 3: US Topographics: Imaging National Landscapes , July 2020 , pp. 470 - 491
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2020
References
1 Jenkins, William, “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape,” in Hershberger, Andrew E., ed., Photographic Theory: An Historical Anthology (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 235–38, 236Google Scholar.
2 For Jenkins, the connection between Ruscha's work and the sense of Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon and Stephen Shore as treating the landscape “topographically” was both evident and troubled. Ruscha was not included in the exhibition despite the obvious visual connection between, for example, the shared serial strategies of Ruscha and the Bechers, but comments on Ruscha's early 1960s photobooks take up the first third of Jenkins's essay. See Foster-Rice, Greg and Rohrbach, John, eds., Reframing the New Topographics (Chicago: Center for American Places, 2010)Google Scholar, for extended consideration of these relationships.
3 Jenkins, 236.
4 See Salvesen, Britt, “New Topographics,” in Adams, Robert, Baltz, Lewis, Becher, Bernd, Becher, Hilla, Deal, Joe, Gohlke, Frank, Nixon, Nicholas, Schott, John, Shore, Stephen and Wessel, Henry Jr., New Topographics (Tucson, Rochester, NY and Göttingen: Centre for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, Steidl, 2013), 11–67, 27Google Scholar.
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7 Eleanor Antin, “Reading Ruscha,” Art in America, 61, 6 (Nov.–Dec. 1973), 64–71, reprinted at www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazine/from-the-archives-reading-ruscha.
8 Edward Ruscha, oral-history interview with Christophe Cherix, 24 Jan. 2012, MoMA, www.moma.org/docs/learn/archives/transcript_ruscha.pdf, 12, 11.
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18 “TateShots.”
19 See the parodies and homages collected in Brouws, Jeff, Burton, Wendy and Zschiegner, Hermann, eds., Various Small Books (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013)Google Scholar.
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21 As Petry, Michael explains in The Art of Not Making: The New Artist/Artisan Relationship (London: Thames and Hudson, 2011), 9Google Scholar, this is the paradox in Duchamp's idea of the artist, too: if there is little difference between the art object and the maker's object the artist's name becomes even more important in shoring up its market value.
22 Ruscha, Leave Any Information at the Signal, 23.
23 Aspen, 8 (1970–71).
24 Charles Gagnon, “Handling Conceptual Art,” Centre for Sensory Studies, occasional papers, Concordia University, http://centreforsensorystudies.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/OP-Gagnon-Handling-Conceptial-Art.pdf, accessed 28 Jan. 2017.
25 Schwartz, Ed Ruscha's Los Angeles, 203.
26 Ruscha, Leave Any Information at the Signal, 47.
27 Antin, “Reading Ruscha.”
28 Rawlinson, “Disconsolate and Inconsolable,” 135.
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32 Italics in original. There may also be a sly reference to Duchamp in the Parking Lots in the way that the shape of the Dodgers stadium from above echoes Alfred Stieglitz's photograph of Duchamp's Fountain.
33 Ruscha, Leave Any Information at the Signal, 297.
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36 Ibid., 795. In other readings, this disarming feeling has often been evoked through citation of Ruscha's comment that “this book had an inexplicable thing I was looking for, and that was a kind of a ‘Huh?’.” Ruscha, Leave Any Information at the Signal, 65.
37 Salvesen, “New Topographics,” 28.
38 Ibid., 28.
39 Ian Walker reads them as parodying ideas of photography as archive: “This seeming off-handedness disturbed the very logic of the class or category as a careful and rationally considered structure of thinking,” he writes. Walker, Ian, “A Kind of a ‘Huh?’ The Siting of Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1962),” in Bello, Patrizia Di, Wilson, Colette and Zamir, Shamoon, eds., The Photobook: From Talbot to Ruscha and Beyond (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012), 178–203, 195Google Scholar.
40 This subsuming of the personal and contingent in favour of geometric precision is part of what Dan Graham, in Homes for America (1966), finds in Ruscha's work and in the shapes of tract houses. For Graham and Ruscha, minimalist serialism picks up on a uniformity that is already extant in the topographical ubiquity of the flattened plane and the box, its repetition with variation an essential part of its physical character.
41 Ruscha, Leave Any Information at the Signal, 340.
42 And it is this uneasy relationship with humanist ideas of personal vision that might see Ruscha as marking a break in the pictorialist lineage that descends through older American photographers such as Minor White or Aron Siskind (or Paul Strand and Edward Weston), who were also concerned with abstraction, and that – as Jenkins urged in his selections for “New Topographics” – might indeed align him more clearly with the anti-subjective concerns of Baltz et al.
43 See Edward Ruscha, oral-history interview with Paul Karlstrom, 29 Oct. 1980–2 Oct. 1981, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-edward-ruscha-12887, accessed 1 May 2017.
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46 Ibid., 236; Ruscha, Leave Any Information at the Signal, 303.
47 Allan, 242.
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49 See Standing Gasoline Station Books, 1963; Twentysix Gasoline Stations (table setting), 1963; Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1964 (graphite on paper – tryptic); Three Hanging Books, 1972 (gunpowder and pastel on paper).
50 Allan, 244.
51 Here, too, there may be a Duchampian intertext in the form of Man Ray's photographs of the Large Glass covered in dust (Dust Breeding, 1920). For Ruscha on Man Ray see Smithsonian oral history.
52 Every Building on the Sunset Strip was taken with “a perspective control lens ‘set at infinity’. The infinity setting is used in commercial photography primarily for capturing distant landscapes. But the relatively close proximity to the structures of Ruscha's images resulted in a ‘snapshot’ aesthetic in which buildings and streets are characterized by a lack of depth. The flatness of the photographs makes the spaces appear artificial, as if they were facades built for a movie set.” Reynolds, Matt, “Landscape in Motion: Nostalgia and Urban Redevelopment in Ed Ruscha's Then and Now: Hollywood Boulevard, 1973 to 2004”, Journal of Urban History, 41, 6 (2015), 1052–72, 56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
53 Rowell, Margit, “Ed Ruscha: Photographer,” in Ruscha, Edward and Rowell, Margit, Ed Ruscha, Photographer (New York: Steidl and Whitney Museum of American Art, 2006), 11–42, 17Google Scholar. Rowell argues (37–38) that “photography helped him see and transpose things flat. It inspired the precision of his crisp edges and engendered his formal devices of horizontal or diagonal baselines, crazy tilted perspectives, incongruous siting or cropping, and high or low vantage points related to tabletop photography and aerial views.”
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid., 24.
56 Interview at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 29 May 2010, https://youtu.be/J-gl7EL7ptk, accessed 1 May 2017.
57 Ruscha, Leave Any Information at the Signal, 375.
58 Salvesen, “New Topographics,” 27.
59 Ruscha states, “Perhaps the obliques are from nonart utilitarian photographs, aerial views, military photographs, scientific photographs. All these utilitarian photographs influenced the act of picture-making.” Rowell, “Ed Ruscha: Photographer,” 27.
60 Elkins, James, The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 176Google Scholar.
61 Rowell, 18. Also: “‘You know those movies where a train starts out in the lower-right corner and gradually fills the screen?’ he asked. ‘The gas station is on a diagonal like that, from lower right to upper left. It also had something to do with teachings I picked up in art school, about dividing the picture plane’.” Calvin Tompkins, “Ed Ruscha's LA: An Artist in the Right Place,” New Yorker.com, 1 July 2013, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/07/01/ed-ruschas-l-a, accessed 1 May 2017. See also MoMA oral history, 46.
62 Banham, Reyner, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 5Google Scholar.
63 Reynolds, “Landscape in Motion,” 1065.
64 In Thirtyfour Parking Lots Ruscha observes that “the largest and most saturated spots indicate which spaces are the most favoured and parked upon.” Ruscha, Leave Any Information at the Signal, 43.
65 For the confluence between the New Topographics work and systems art see Foster-Rice, “Systems Everywhere.”
66 Ruscha, Leave Any Information at the Signal, 212.
67 Perhaps here we can see a kind of antagonistic relationship with time similar to the one Lee, Pamela writes of in Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006)Google Scholar.
68 Newbury, “Thirtyfour Parking Lots in the Fragmented Metropolis,” 55.