Ed Ruscha Research

Ed Ruscha

A painter, printmaker, and filmmaker, Edward Ruscha was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1937. Shortly after his birth he moved with his family to Oklahoma City, where he lived for about 15 years before moving permanently to Los Angeles. While in Los Angeles he studied at the Chouinard Art Institute (now known as the California Institute of the Arts) from 1956 through 1960. By the early sixties he was well known for his paintings, collages, and printmaking, and for his association with the Ferus Gallery group. His work is influenced by his life in urban Los Angeles along with words. He uses painting, photography, and drawing to communicate a particular urban experience. To successfully evoke this message Ruscha uses his expertise from his early career as a graphic designer as inspiration for his photographs.

Since the beginning of Ed Ruscha’s career in the late 1950s, photography has been both an inspiration and a source of discovery. Like his paintings, he includes words and signs (typography and signage) in his photography. He uses the common words and simple landscapes to create complex tales of modern society. For the most part, his photographs are thematic and make a reference to an aspect of American life.

His work is neither purely documentary nor solely artistic. As stated previously, the majority of his pictures depict motifs drawn from American landscapes, specifically sites in Southern California and also the Western United States. He has shot a vairety of subjects to convey American life such as, apartment buildings, mundane household products, swimming pools, gas stations, and aerial views of parking lots. Some pivotal achievements for Ed Ruscha are the photographs taken in Thirtyfour Parking Lots and Twentysix Gasoline Stations. Overall, a viewer analyzing Ruscha’s photographs will notice that Ed Ruscha’s abiding interest in typography, language, and the everyday.

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