Ed Ruscha, Photographer

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Although known for his paintings and drawings, California artist Ed Ruscha has also attracted critical attention for his
photography. A new exhibition and accompanying catalogue, Ed Ruscha, Photographer, departs from earlier analyses
to explore how the artist’s different disciplines—painting, drawing, printmaking, and photography—are guided and
shaped by a single vision.
Ruscha’s relationship to photography is complex and ambivalent and his work is difficult to define. He has referred to
his photography as a “hobby” but from the outset it has drawn considerable critical interest. The small books of photographs
that Ruscha produced in the sixties and seventies earned him a reputation as an underground artist among his
peers, and have influenced subsequent generations of artists in Europe and North America. The photographs were
snapshot size, with an amateurish quality that intrigued his contemporaries. Neither purely documentary nor solely artistic,
their subject matter was stereotypical and banal, with motifs drawn from sites in Southern California or the western
United States. This, combined with their serial presentation, created a mythical road-movie or photo-novel effect with
Beat Generation innuendos and inspired interest among artists at a time when serial logic was prominent in Pop art and
Minimalism, and later in Conceptual art.