Ed Ruscha's Streets of Los Angeles

Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles is a multi-year initiative at the GRI centered on digitizing five decades of Ed Ruscha’s photographic project to document the streets of Los Angeles. We are currently developing a digital publication in Quire, the Getty’s open-source publishing tool, to circulate original scholarship by a group of international scholars whose research has informed the digitization of the collection.

As editor of the Archive section of the book, I draw on my dissertation research in 1960s-1970s American photography as well as my more recent work on photographic archives. In addition, as a digital humanist on the project, I produced data visualizations and mock-ups that would communicate the editorial team’s vision to the design firm producing the book. For example, using SPARQL, IIIF, and the ivpy python library, I created a visualization that is essentially a giant contact sheet of the 8,600+ photographs in Ruscha’s 1975 shoot of Sunset Boulevard.