Ed Ruscha: Then & Now “Hollywood Boulevard 1973-2004”

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.