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Through analysis of Ed Ruscha’s visionary Streets of Los Angeles Archive, this volume provides new understandings of his artistic practice, the history of L.A., and the innovative role of technology in the archive.

In 1966, Ed Ruscha drove a car rigged with a motorized camera to capture Los Angeles’ most iconic street: Sunset Boulevard. He created a time capsule of its famed facades, beginning a sixty-year-long commitment to documenting the changing urban landscape of postwar Los Angeles. The Streets of Los Angeles project that comprises these photographs is likely the most comprehensive artistic record of any city, with over 900,000 images of major thoroughfares. Ruscha’s photographs constitute an unparalleled visual chronicle of both iconic and everyday sites in L.A., including popular music venues, neighborhood restaurants, and billboards promoting Hollywood’s latest blockbusters.
 
In this volume, scholars from disciplines such as urban planning, cultural geography, architecture, art history, and musicology explore the Streets of Los Angeles Archive as a rich repository for analyzing Ruscha’s practice and the city’s visual culture. Using his photographs and new data visualizations, the authors consider what it means to interpret an archive mostly accessible through digital technologies, and they demonstrate how histories of art have been indelibly reshaped since the advent of the information age in the 1960s.
 
This publication was created using Quire™, a multiformat publishing tool from Getty. The free online edition of this open-access publication is available at www.getty.edu/publications/ruscha/ and includes video, data visualizations, and zoomable illustrations. Free PDF and EPUB downloads of the book are also available.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky undertook a quest to document an empire that was undergoing rapid change due to industrialization and the building of railroads. Between 1903 and 1916 Prokudin-Gorsky, who developed a pioneering method of capturing color images on glass plates, scoured the Russian Empire with the patronage of Nicholas II. Intrepidly carrying his cumbersome and awkward camera from the western borderlands over the Volga River to Siberia and central Asia, he created a singular record of Imperial Russia.
In 1918 Prokudin-Gorsky escaped an increasingly chaotic, violent Russia and regained nearly 2,000 of his bulky glass negatives. His subsequent peripatetic existence before settling in Paris makes his collection's survival all the more miraculous. The U.S. Library of Congress acquired Prokudin-Gorsky's collection in 1948, and since then it has become a touchstone for understanding pre-revolutionary Russia. Now digitized and publicly available, his images are a sensation in Russia, where people visit websites dedicated to them.
William Craft Brumfield—photographer, scholar, and the leading authority on Russian architecture in the West—began working with Prokudin-Gorsky's photographs in 1985. He curated the first public exhibition of them in the United States and has annotated the entire collection. In Journeys through the Russian Empire, Brumfield—who has spent decades traversing Russia and photographing buildings and landscapes in their various stages of disintegration or restoration—juxtaposes Prokudin-Gorsky's images against those he took of the same buildings and areas. In examining the intersections between his own photography and that of Prokudin-Gorsky, Brumfield assesses the state of preservation of Russia's architectural heritage and calls into question the nostalgic assumptions of those who see Prokudin-Gorsky's images as the recovery of the lost past of an idyllic, pre-Soviet Russia.
This lavishly illustrated volume—which features some 400 stunning full-color images of ancient churches and mosques, railways and monasteries, towns and remote natural landscapes—is a testament to two brilliant photographers whose work prompts and illuminates, monument by monument, questions of conservation, restoration, and cultural identity and memory.

An illustrated account of the life and work of the pioneering photographer

The Photographic Legacy of Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864–1952) draws on original papers and photographs from the Library of Congress to document the extraordinary life and nearly seventy-year career of this pioneering photographer. Maria Elizabeth Ausherman illuminates the early origins of Johnston’s style and vision, and her attempts to change society through her art. One of the first women to work in an emerging field dominated by men, Johnston achieved acclaim as an accomplished photographer and photojournalist.

As the official White House photographer for five administrations, she was instrumental in defining the medium and inspiring women to train in and appreciate photography. But it is her monumental nine-state survey of southern American architecture that stands as her most significant contribution to the history and development of photography both as art and as documentary. Through her photography, Johnston showed reverence for the beautiful historic buildings she appreciated and also helped shape architectural and photographic preservation in the United States.
 

Vesna Pavlović: Stagecraft features four extensive bodies of the photographer's work, spanning from the early 2000s to today—photographs of the Yugoslav socialist modernist hotel spaces from her internationally recognized series "Hotels"; photographs of the ceremonial space of the Yugoslav Presidential Palace in Belgrade from the series "Collection/Kolekcija" and the recent "Fabrics of Socialism" and "Sites of Memory" series exploring the archives of the Museum of Yugoslav History.

The book includes critical essays that contextualize and expound on Pavlović's unique treatment of the photographic medium, in which a photographic moment is expanded to include the conditions of image making, production, documentation, and representation.