Every building on the Sunset Strip
Edward Ruscha (Photographer)
Panoramic offset lithographic photographic strips documenting every building present on both sides of Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, California in 1966, printed on an accordion- folded strip of paper that opens to 27 feet. The photographic strips show buildings, intersections, parked cars, and signs along both sides of the Strip, viewed as if driving down the street. Captions below the photographs include the names of cross streets and house numbers for the buildings. By documenting the Sunset Strip objectively using a motorized Nikon mounted on the back of a pick-up truck and driving down the street, using a cheap printing process, providing no text other than factual street names and numbers, and packaging the images inside a plain white cover with simple title in gray, and reflective box with no title at all, Ruscha "created a new genre of art book designed for commercial distributors rather than art galleries. Ruscha's books, which became a staple of Conceptualism, were extremely influential to younger generations of artists;" see the Manhattan Rare Book Company website at http://www.manhattanrarebooks-art.com/ruscha.htm
Print Book, English, 1966
[Edward Ruscha], [Los Angeles, California], 1966
Artists' books (books) 1966
1 volume (26 unnumbered double leaves) : chiefly illustrations ; 19 cm
688469
First edition, first printing. In this printing, the last photo was too large to fit the page; the page was extended to accomodate the full picture and then had to be folded to preserve the flush edge. Ruscha was unhappy with this solution, and for the second printing (1970), he made sure that the last photo was cropped to fit a regular size page, and thus did not need to be folded. See The works of Edward Ruscha (New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1982), page 169