Ed Ruscha, the pop artist who gave us iconic images like Norm’s on fire and flying Spam, is Los Angeles’s favorite adopted son.
As a young man in the mid-1950s, the Oklahoma-raised Ruscha moved to the City of Angels and never left. He attended Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts) and soon established a name for himself in the rising conceptual art scene, a movement that privileged the idea behind a work over its aesthetic result. Some of Ruscha’s early conceptual projects—like Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) and Some Los Angeles Apartments (1965)—inextricably linked Ruscha to the southern California landscape.
One of Ruscha’s most ambitious works was called Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), for which he mounted an automated camera in the back of his pickup truck to photograph a mile and a half of the famous street, stitched the images together, and published the sweeping panoramas as an accordion book. Over the next 60 years, Ruscha and his team continued to drive around documenting Los Angeles’ boulevards as they changed from decade to decade.
The result is a stunning historical archive of the major arteries of the city unlike anything else: businesses open and fold, styles go in and out with the times, and the development of neighborhoods is made visible like never before. It is Google Street View sent back in time.
The Streets of Los Angeles archive, housed at the Getty Research Institute, includes over 750,000 negatives, digital files, contact sheets, and notebooks, many of which have been digitized and are publicly available. It comprises two collections: Edward Ruscha photographs of Sunset Boulevard and Hollywood Boulevard, 1965–2010 and Edward Ruscha photographs of Los Angeles streets, 1974–2010.
You can also virtually drive down Sunset Boulevard between 1965 and 2007, with the ability to search for specific addresses, keywords, and landmarks thanks to AI tagging.
The archive reveals many stories about LA’s urban history. Learn more about the digitization project, watch a video overview of the collection, read about the city’s evolving music scene, or listen to a podcast. A digital publication, Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles: Artist. Image, City, Archive is forthcoming from Getty in 2025.
