Los Angeles Apartments
Los Angeles Apartments is the catalogue for a 1990 Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition devoted to Edward Ruscha's 1965 self-published artist book of the same name, organised by curator Richard Marshall.
Ruscha's original 1965 book presented deadpan, frontal photographs of Los Angeles apartment buildings, part of a series of small self-published photobooks — alongside Twentysix Gasoline Stations and Every Building on the Sunset Strip — that treated the vernacular architecture of the city as a found conceptual subject. This 63-page paperback catalogue, shown at the Whitney from July to October 1990, reproduces the project and situates it within Ruscha's early photographic practice.
Ruscha (b. 1937) emerged in the 1960s Los Angeles art scene working across painting, printmaking and photography, and his self-published books are now considered foundational to the artist's book as a form. This catalogue was also issued through Harry N. Abrams in a 1993 edition, extending the exhibition's reach beyond the museum run.
