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Ed Ruscha: Then & Now | 
 enlarge | Author: Ed Ruscha
Publisher: Steidl
Category: Book
List Price: $175.00
Buy Used: $52.70
You Save: $122.30 (70%)
New (22) Used (15) Collectible (3) from $52.70
Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 293651
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 148
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 6.8
Dimensions (in): 17.7 x 12.8 x 1
ISBN: 3865211054
Dewey Decimal Number: 770
EAN: 9783865211057
ASIN: 3865211054
Publication Date: August 15, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: NOTE - Jumbo book- crisp, clean, unread hardcover with light shelfwear and edgewear to the boards, missing box slipcase and a publisher's mark to one edge - NICE!
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Product Description
Between 1963 and 1978 Ed Ruscha produced eighteen small artists' books. Usually self-published in small print-runs, these publications have become seminal works in the history of conceptual art and the photography book. THEN & NOW is the first artist book that Ruscha has made since 1978. One of the most famous of Ruscha's books from that early period is Every Building on the Sunset Strip--a famous stretch of real estate along Sunset Boulevard--published in 1966. In July, 1973 he followed the same procedure when he photographed on Hollywood Boulevard. Loading a continuous strip of 30 feet of Ilford FP-4 black & white film into his Nikon F2 and then mounting it on a tripod in the bed of a pickup truck, he drove back and forth across the 12 miles of street shooting both the north and south sides of its entire length. The negatives were developed, contact sheets were made, and the materials placed in storage. Thirty years later, in 2003, a digital record of Hollywood Boulevard was created and it served as a reference guide for the traditional film/still documentary of 2004. For this shoot, the same type of camera equipment was used to re-photograph the street on 35mm color-negative film. The resulting material of both shoots--4,500 black & white and 13,000 color images--have been scanned and digitally composed into four panoramics of the complete 12 miles. In THEN & NOW the original 1973 North side view is shown along the top of the page and juxtaposed with its 2004 version. The panoramics face each other and they are aligned. The result is what Ruscha refers to as "a piece of history . . . A very democratic, unemotional look at the world." Whilst it is a significant historical document which succinctly conflates and renders the passage of time, it is also a project which spans the career of one of the truly original artists of our time and brings his work full circle.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Forerunning Hollywood Boulevard December 21, 2007
Francesco Nonino (Bologna, Italy)
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' July 22, 2007
Robin Benson
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
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