Sunset Over Sunset

Sunset Over Sunset (https://www.sunsetoversunset.org/) is an urban digital humanities project co-directed by Francesca Russello Ammon, Brian D. Goldstein, and Garrett Dash Nelson. An interactive, immersive website, the project brings together thousands of photographs taken of Los Angeles's Sunset Boulevard over fifty years by the noted artist Edward Ruscha. Ruscha photographed the Sunset Strip in 1965 for his celebrated book Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966). Less well known is that he then returned to capture the entirety of the boulevard—from downtown LA to the Pacific Ocean—repeatedly thereafter. The Getty Research Institute acquired and digitized these images; we were selected as one of a handful of teams to have initial research access to them.

Sunset Over Sunset, the outcome of that work, arose from the premise that Ruscha's photos, while significant as a work of art, are also an unprecedented source for understanding incremental urban change over time in one of the major cities in the US. Put simply, the images show facade alterations, the arrival of new building occupants, changing language on signage, and many other phenomena that either are not documented in typical sources or are difficult to find in conventional archives. Such changes help reframe the history of transformation in the late twentieth century city not as the outcome of the large-scale redevelopment projects that have often received attention, but as the year-by-year, building-by-building, everyday work of people—builders, business owners, landlords, and tenants—redeveloping the city from the ground up. The vernacular forms of redevelopment they practiced at the property level, including modest demolition, new construction, addition, and rehabilitation, have been overshadowed by the work of officials and experts, but Sunset Over Sunset helps reveal them through Ruscha’s illuminating photographs.

The site brings together five years of Ruscha's photos—1966, 1973, 1985, 1995, and 2007—over the ten miles from Hollywood to downtown LA, and builds in a range of qualitative and quantitative data (Census records, newspaper articles, business directories, and more) "behind" the photos, organized at the address level. The project thereby facilitates their use by urban historians and others with interest in understanding urban change over time. To model these possibilities, Sunset Over Sunset includes a series of brief essays (called "Stories") that exemplify the range of histories encompassed by Sunset, including the history of Latinx and Thai diasporas; the rise of new kinds of commercial spaces, like mini-malls; the often hard-to-see presence of sex work and sexuality as integral parts of the street's history; and the changing presence and role of familiar building types like gas stations, restaurants, and banks. In recording such stories, Ruscha's photos—and the site—offer a new angle on big themes of U.S. history in this period, including globalization, immigration, urban transformation, and climate change.

The co-directors have also built upon the site’s insights for a longer essay, to be included in the forthcoming volume, Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles: City, Archive, Image, Artist, ed. Andrew Perchuk, Emily Pugh, and Zanna Gilbert (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2025), and featured in a video produced in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art’s recent exhibition, ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN, a retrospective of Ruscha’s career.