Books & Co, a show at the Gagosian uptown, kicks off with a framed typewritten letter to Ed Ruscha from 1963 that states, “I am, herewith, returning this copy of Twenty Six Gasoline Stations, which the Library of Congress does not wish to add to its collections." It’s hilarious because the book, along with others Ruscha published in that decade, is a now-canonical work that impressed a generation of photo and print artists, whose books are featured in this exhibit right alongside Ruscha’s. (Also, those first editions are now worth a small fortune.) Ruscha’s books are simple things, Playbill-sized volumes with glued binding and blunt graphics: white paper, modern black type face, a picture on every page, blank pages to separate sections. His method is to choose one type of thing (gas stations, apartment buildings, parking lots, palm trees), photograph it over and over again, and collect the photographs in a book. In the 1960’s, before digital photography and home printing, the acts of photography and publishing conferred authority. The things Ruscha selected to photograph were rooted in the landscape of Los Angeles, where he spent his teenage years and continues to live and work. There’s a bit of a scientific impulse in his method, similar to the those of August Sander, and Bernd and Hilla Becher, who use photography to classify and record what they see. Ruscha’s book Every Building on the Sunset Strip, that documents that street in two long, linear collages of black and white photos along a single, unfolding, horizontal page, seems particularly so. But that book also has the feeling of a scrapbook, softened by memories.
Ruscha isn’t too concerned with being comprehensive, or even faithful. He gives his books names that are literal and funny without being sarcastic. Some Los Angeles Apartments, Various Small Fires and Milk, and Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass, are all each exactly what they say they are. Ruscha’s original photographs now hang in MoMA and the Whitney, but these same images are more powerful when framed within the books. They don’t easily mythologize the American landscape (like Robert Frank’s) or satirize it (like Gary Winogrand’s). His intentions aren't political or provocative. One of Rushca’s book is called Colored People but contains photos of small cacti, and another book called Hard Light contains photographs, entirely chaste, of an attractive young female couple as they pass they day together. Like Warhol, who also exploited photography for its impersonal emotional and graphic power, Ruscha uses the medium to mirror vernacular American culture. He's content to show us what’s out there and what it's like, which is hard to see when we’re standing inside of it.