Although known for his paintings and drawings, California artist Ed Ruscha has also attracted critical attention for his photography. A new exhibition and accompanying catalogue, Ed Ruscha, Photographer, departs from earlier analyses to explore how the artists different disciplinespainting, drawing, printmaking, and photographyare guided and shaped by a single vision. Ruschas relationship to photography is complex and ambivalent and his work is difficult to define. He has referred to his photography as a hobby but from the outset it has drawn considerable critical interest. The small books of photographs that Ruscha produced in the sixties and seventies earned him a reputation as an underground artist among his peers, and have influenced subsequent generations of artists in Europe and North America. The photographs were snapshot size, with an amateurish quality that intrigued his contemporaries. Neither purely documentary nor solely artistic, their subject matter was stereotypical and banal, with motifs drawn from sites in Southern California or the western United States. This, combined with their serial presentation, created a mythical road-movie or photo-novel effect with Beat Generation innuendos and inspired interest among artists at a time when serial logic was prominent in Pop art and Minimalism, and later in Conceptual art. Margit Rowell is an art historian, critic and museum curator working mostly in Paris and New York. Working independently today, her earlier long-term affiliations were with the Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Musée National dArt Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she organized exhibitions of classical modern and contemporary artists (among them Joan Miró, Constantin Brancusi, Sigmar Polke, and Luciano Fabro). In 2004, she organized a major exhibition of the drawings of Ed Ruscha for the Whitney Museum of American Art, which traveled to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and inspired the present study of Ed Ruschas photographs.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
A well-produced book of Ruscha's photo work to coincide with a previous Whitney Museum exhibition. In the first forty pages Margit Rowell (who organised the exhibition) writes about Rusha's life and influences: an intriguing mixture of European commonplace, culture and heavy doses of American commercialism and print pop culture. I thought though that she found it hard going to explain some of his work within the context of fine art. Ruscha doesn't easily fit into a high culture setting and to my mind some of his endeavours are just plain mundane: the 'Babycakes' book for instance (I fancy Ed might well agree with me, too) but he is prepared to have a go at anything: painting, drawing, screenprinting, photography, publishing, films and clearly some great art has come out of all these different mediums.
The photo section of the book (114 pages and beautifully printed in 175dpi) runs from some of his first photo work in the late fifties, his European trip in 1961 to the last one, a colour print presciently titled The End#4 from 1998. Annoyingly some of the images in this section could have been larger on the page, frequently the white space overpowers a photo that has plenty of detail. Included are eleven of my favorites, his aerial shots of LA parking lots, actually taken by photographer Art Alanis one Sunday in 1967, when the lots were empty.
Not having seen any of Rusha's famous self-published books I was surprised to read in Rowell's essay that some of them have many blank pages. Ruscha's creative ideas only stretched to so many single images but a book has many pages, so why not just leave some of them blank and maintain the medium of a book. Apart from blank pages there was always the option of just changing the subject.... Read more ›
The photo section of the book (114 pages and beautifully printed in 175dpi) runs from some of his first photo work in the late fifties, his European trip in 1961 to the last one, a colour print presciently titled The End#4 from 1998. Annoyingly some of the images in this section could have been larger on the page, frequently the white space overpowers a photo that has plenty of detail. Included are eleven of my favorites, his aerial shots of LA parking lots, actually taken by photographer Art Alanis one Sunday in 1967, when the lots were empty.
Not having seen any of Rusha's famous self-published books I was surprised to read in Rowell's essay that some of them have many blank pages. Ruscha's creative ideas only stretched to so many single images but a book has many pages, so why not just leave some of them blank and maintain the medium of a book. Apart from blank pages there was always the option of just changing the subject.... Read more ›
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
5.0 out of 5 stars
3 reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
The medium is the message
6 Sep 2006
By Robin Benson
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Hardcover
A well-produced book of Ruscha's photo work to coincide with his Whitney Museum exhibition. In the first forty pages Margit Rowell (who organized the exhibition) writes about Rusha's life and influences: an intriguing mixture of European commonplace; culture and heavy doses of American commercialism and print pop culture. I thought, though that she found it hard going to explain some of his work within the context of fine art. Ruscha doesn't easily fit into a high culture setting and to my mind some of his endeavors are just plain mundane, the 'Babycakes' book for instance (I fancy Ed might well agree with me, too) but he is prepared to have a go at anything: painting, drawing, screen-printing, photography, publishing, films and clearly some great art has come out of all these different mediums.
The photo section of the book (114 pages and beautifully printed in 175 screen) runs from some of his first photo works in the late fifties, his European trip in 1961 to the last one, a color print presciently titled The End#4 from 1998. Annoyingly some of the images in this section could have been larger on the page, frequently the white space overpowers a photo that has plenty of detail. Included are eleven of my favorites, his aerial shots of LA parking lots, actually taken by photographer Art Alanis one Sunday in 1967, when the lots were empty.
Not having seen any of Rusha's famous self-published books I was surprised to read in Rowell's essay that some of them have many blank pages. Ruscha's creative ideas only stretched to so many single images but a book has many pages, so why not just leave some of them blank and maintain the medium of a book. Apart from blank pages there was always the option of just changing the subject. His 1964 'Various Small Fires' features fifteen snapshots of an incendiary nature (a Zippo lighter, a match, domestic gas range, a smoking cigarette, for example) in a forty-eight page book but there is a sixteenth shot of a glass of milk. Ed said, in 1965, "Milk seemed to make the book more interesting and gave it more cohesion". Go figure!
The back of the book lists the exhibits, a selected bibliography, chronology and finally the index. Overall an excellent overview of Rusha's photography and confirming to me, at least, that he is a bit of a creative enigma.
***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.
The photo section of the book (114 pages and beautifully printed in 175 screen) runs from some of his first photo works in the late fifties, his European trip in 1961 to the last one, a color print presciently titled The End#4 from 1998. Annoyingly some of the images in this section could have been larger on the page, frequently the white space overpowers a photo that has plenty of detail. Included are eleven of my favorites, his aerial shots of LA parking lots, actually taken by photographer Art Alanis one Sunday in 1967, when the lots were empty.
Not having seen any of Rusha's famous self-published books I was surprised to read in Rowell's essay that some of them have many blank pages. Ruscha's creative ideas only stretched to so many single images but a book has many pages, so why not just leave some of them blank and maintain the medium of a book. Apart from blank pages there was always the option of just changing the subject. His 1964 'Various Small Fires' features fifteen snapshots of an incendiary nature (a Zippo lighter, a match, domestic gas range, a smoking cigarette, for example) in a forty-eight page book but there is a sixteenth shot of a glass of milk. Ed said, in 1965, "Milk seemed to make the book more interesting and gave it more cohesion". Go figure!
The back of the book lists the exhibits, a selected bibliography, chronology and finally the index. Overall an excellent overview of Rusha's photography and confirming to me, at least, that he is a bit of a creative enigma.
***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
ED RUSHA'S RED BOOK. photographer
17 Jan 2007
By Pier Francesco Gnot
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Hardcover
It's a brilliant book for understand the rusha's research in photography,what he tooks from pictures and transform in art language.This books is really well done with good text and the immages have a chronologically order and related to the text too.I'm italian and so i have to reed that book ,because speaks about an author that isn't really famous in italy...i think is impossible to find something like that rusha's book in my language
Sorry for my bad english but this book is good for suare!!
Sorry for my bad english but this book is good for suare!!
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ruscha: Photographer
8 April 2011
By Nathan J. Feller
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Hardcover
This is a great book to get if you are interested in Ed Ruscha's artwork. I also think that this is an excellent view on his photography and books that he self-published in the 60's. I am a big fan of his work and I really was impressed on how the book discusses (and shows images) of his books that he created. There isn't too much out there that's written on his artist-books as much as there is on his paintings. So, because of that, I really like and recommend this book.
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