Ed Ruscha: Photographer Hardcover – June 1, 2006

I would classify Ed Ruscha as principally a visual artist who works in different media. Of course, photography is an art form and the artist works in that medium as well as in paint, prints, film and drawing. This particular book emphasizes photography and that is the way I first came to hear of him. Photo critic A. D. Coleman wrote a brief summary of Ruscha's artist's book: 26 Gas Stations, and include a few pictures. Somehow this rather simple unpretentious work captivated me with the very ordinary black and white photos taken with a decent but also unpretentious camera. Maybe it was because these photos depicted visual icons of that time. In any case it was only many years later that I found out that Ruscha was active in so many other are as of art. I found this book extremely interesting, showing the familiar "landscapes and cityscapes" of our times, spaces and culture in unfamiliar ways.

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.

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.

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 languageSorry for my bad english but this book is good for suare!!