Photographer

Ed Ruscha, Photographer is the 2006 book Steidl and the Whitney Museum of American Art published on Ruscha's photographic work, with an essay by curator Margit Rowell and a foreword by Whitney director Adam D. Weinberg.

The hardcover volume surveys four decades of Ruscha's photography. Rowell's essay describes his early pictures as deliberately artless, shot from the hip rather than composed, setting the tone for the works in other media that followed. The exhibition the book accompanied traveled beyond the Whitney to the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the Jeu de Paume in Paris.

Photography runs underneath Ruscha's better-known work in painting and artist's books: the photographs behind projects like Twentysix Gasoline Stations are themselves the subject of Ed Ruscha and Photography, the Whitney's earlier, 2004 survey curated by Sylvia Wolf. Photographer, curated separately by Rowell two years later, looks at the same photographic practice on its own terms rather than as a source for the books.