Photography

Ed Ruscha and Photography is the catalogue the Whitney Museum of American Art and Steidl published in 2004 for an exhibition curated by Sylvia Wolf. It was built around the museum's major acquisition of Ruscha's photographic archive.

The nearly 300-page hardcover traces photography's role across Ruscha's career. It opens with vintage prints from a seven-month tour of Europe in 1961 and moves through the photographs behind his artist's books, among them Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Various Small Fires and Milk, Some Los Angeles Apartments, Thirty-Four Parking Lots in Los Angeles, Royal Road Test, Babycakes with Weights, and Real Estate Opportunities. It also includes sixteen unpublished images from the Gasoline Stations shoot. Wolf's text draws on conversations with Ruscha, and the exhibition ran at the Whitney from June 24 through September 26, 2004.

The book treats photography as foundational to Ruscha's practice, not incidental to it. The artist's books that made his reputation in the 1960s grew directly out of this way of working with a camera. It preceded Ed Ruscha, Photographer, a related but separately curated Margit Rowell project published two years later on the same body of work.