The Photography Books of Ed Ruscha

The Los Angeles artist Ed Ruscha, has never sought recognition as a serious photographer and, in fact, made it clear that he uses photographs as an armature for his work, an underlying structure that supports his paintings and graphics. Even so, the influence of his early artists books, Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Various Small Fires and Milk, Every Building On The Sunset Strip, all composed
primarily of photographs, has been profound. Cited in all the major
references, Ruscha's camera work introduced elements of conceptualism and process art into photography, which had in large part been a previously unexplored medium for those concepts. Ruscha's dead-pan, flatly ironic, and uninflected explorations of various locales, apparently chosen for their near total lack of inherent aesthetic interest, forced the question of what makes a photograph interesting.

By the mid 1970's, Ruscha had all but stopped making photographic books. By then, however, his work was known and discussed among artists and photographers around the world; Bernd and Hilla Becher, the German photographers and teachers, had early on used his work in the classroom, where their students included such currently promenient photographers as Thomas Ruff and Andreas Gursky. Ruscha's esthetic of exhaustively exploring a single, often banal setting had become a common exercise among photographers. Ruscha may have stopped taking photographs, but his lack of recent work hasn't diminished his influence.

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