[.uk] Ed Ruscha: Then & Now (ISBN 3865211054)

Forerunning Hollywood Boulevard:
Thirty years after his seminal 1973 book, Ed Ruscha drives again along Hollywood Boulevard taking pictures of every detail of both sides of the street: contemporary colour pictures matched with the early black and white originals. The book is an extraordinary re-documentation of the street, revealing social and architectural changes. But most of all it is a convincing proof of the vitality of the conceptual basis of Ruscha's work, that looks amazingly contemporary, even three decades later. By using the photographic medium in a detached, non-passionate way (this time he did not even take the pictures, therefore disappearing as the "author"), by structuring his systematic work as if it were a catalog or a technical atlas on how mankind settled its territory, he reminds us how prophetic his early work was, anticipating issues that would have been the basis for most of the forthcoming artistic reasearch, not only in photography.

Cruisin':
I bought this from Amazon UK at an amazing low price (perhaps they thought it might eventually be a stockroom dust-catcher) and it turns out to be a wonderful piece of Americana though I'm not quite sure you could call it Art, maybe art. This is a large book with 148 (unnumbered) pages which open up to thirty-five inches wide with the two versions of Hollywood Boulevard running across the top of the page and the opposite side running along the bottom upside down, sort of awkward if you want to see both sides of the Boulevard at the same time. The printing (and paper) of the panoramas is excellent. Rarely have I seen images printed in 250dpi, it is so good that you can read all kinds of commercial signage along the way. Regular strollers in the area could possible recognize themselves if they were there on June 5, 2004. As expected there have been plenty of changes between 1973 and 2004. Many of the empty spaces in '73 now have buildings but it does work the other way round, greenery has replaced some buildings by 2004. Because the book has no text, apart from title and credit pages I often wondered why Ruscha wanted to photograph twelve miles of Hollywood Boulevard. It is unfortunate that for about half the book there is not too much to look at. From the start at Sunset Plaza there are just garden walls, vegetation and a glimpse of houses set back from the street. It's not until you get to Laurel Canyon where apartments start to appear and then the visually interesting commercialism starts around La Brea Avenue. The rest of the route, until it runs into Sunset Boulevard at Hillhurst Avenue, is interesting to look at, though. Here's a tip: pull up HB on Google Earth and see an aerial view as you check out the front of buildings in the book. 'Then & Now' is an intriguing example of Ruscha's work (he designed it, too) which will probably increase in value and I see that signed copies are being offered at eight hundred dollars plus on some book websites. ***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.