Edward Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966).
Team Members: Francesca Russello Ammon, Brian D. Goldstein, Garrett Dash Nelson
Sunset over Sunset: Ed Ruscha’s Street-Level View and the Postwar Redevelopment Vernacular is a collaborative digital project that examines artist Ed Ruscha’s serial rephotography of Los Angeles streets to uncover a fine-grained history of late twentieth-century urban change. Our team is one of five selected by the Getty Research Institute to develop projects using the Getty’s Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles Archive, a newly digitized collection of more than a million images that Ruscha has taken of LA streets since the mid-1960s. In particular, our project focuses on the most iconic of Ruscha’s subjects, Sunset Boulevard.
Through a web-based exploratory tool that stitches together and juxtaposes thousands of images of Sunset Boulevard between Doheny Road and downtown Los Angeles in five different years (between 1966 and 2007), our project will give users a panoramic view of the city’s urban transformation across this era. Metaphorically and interactively “behind” the photographs, layers of census data, building occupancy information, and other qualitative sources will provide fuller context for visible changes at each address. Overlaid upon the panoramas, users will find analytical narratives that illuminate particular stories of change focused on specific building types or urban conditions. We aim to create an easily navigated site that includes both guided tours and open-ended possibilities.
Sunset over Sunset will illuminate vernacular forms of urban development that have been overshadowed in recent scholarship by more dramatic, large-scale projects of both public and private origin. Such large projects were ultimately only a small part of the history of postwar cities. More ubiquitous were the myriad small gestures that remade urban fabric through relatively modest demolition, new construction, addition, and rehabilitation at the property level. Through the juxtaposition and analytical interpretation of Ruscha’s photographs within the site, and longer scholarly articles developed from the site, we hope to reveal a more complex and subtle picture of urban change over space and time, expanding the locus of historical agency beyond officials and experts to include the everyday work of builders, business owners, landlords, and tenants.