Picturing distance: Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles photobooks

Garland, Sarah (2020) Picturing distance: Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles photobooks. Journal of American Studies, 54 (3). pp. 470-491. ISSN 0021-8758

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Abstract

Ed Ruscha's photobooks create a deliberate type of low-key provocation the artist has referred to as a type of “Huh?” – a presentation of the American landscape in a book format that makes it very difficult to locate unambiguous cues for meaning or clear affect in the photographs. This essay lays out an extended reading of the notion of “distance” as uniting these photobooks in their physicality, in the ways in which the postwar industrial landscape of Los Angeles is presented to the viewer obliquely, and in the cooled manner of affect that was so influential for later artists.

Item Type:	Article
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Art, Media and American Studies (former - to 2024)
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > American Studies
Related URLs:	http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?...
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	18 Jun 2019 15:30
Last Modified:	09 Jul 2025 00:01
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/71460
DOI:	10.1017/S0021875819000975

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