Image: Getty Villa, Los Angeles
Getty has released a new open-access publication, 'Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles: Artist, Image, Archive, City', devoted to the artist’s long-running photographic project documenting the city’s streets and urban landscape. The online volume is presented by the Getty Research Institute and is available in PDF and EPUB formats, with a paperback edition also listed on the publication page.
According to the publication text, Ruscha began the project in 1966, when he drove a car fitted with a motorized camera to photograph Sunset Boulevard. The resulting body of work grew into a sustained record of postwar Los Angeles, and Getty describes the archive as containing more than 900,000 images of major thoroughfares. The photographs capture a mix of iconic and everyday sites, including music venues, neighborhood restaurants, and billboards advertising Hollywood films.
The volume is edited by Andrew Perchuk, Emily Pugh, and Zanna Gilbert, with Tracy Stuber and Isabel Frampton Wade. Its contents are organized into four sections—'Project', 'Artist', 'Image', 'Archive', and 'City'—and bring together contributors working across urban planning, cultural geography, architecture, art history, and musicology. Getty says the book uses Ruscha’s photographs and new data visualizations to examine both the archive itself and the changing visual culture of Los Angeles.
The site also notes that the project is treated not simply as an art-historical case study, but as a resource shaped by digital access and data analysis. The publication’s introduction states that the authors consider what it means to interpret an archive that is mostly accessible through digital technologies, while tracing how histories of art have been reshaped since the information age began in the 1960s.
A video introduction on the publication page points readers to several essays in the volume, including 'Ed Ruscha’s Street-Level View and the Postwar Redevelopment Vernacular' by Francesca Russello Ammon, Brian D. Goldstein, and Garrett Dash Nelson; 'Songs for Every Address' by Josh Kun; and 'From Banks to Blanks' by Kate Palmer Albers. The publication page also lists a full table of contents spanning essays on the archive, image-making, and the city, alongside acknowledgments and contributor information.
The volume is part of Getty’s continuing engagement with Ruscha’s street photography archive and the visual record it created of Los Angeles. Its publication date is listed as 2025 on the page, and the work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 for the text, with image rights retained by the relevant rights holders.
