Exploring Postwar Urban Redevelopment Using Ed Ruscha's Los Angeles Photography

Between 1965 and 2007, artist Ed Ruscha photographed Los Angeles's Sunset Boulevard twelve times. Working with a team of collaborators, Ruscha devised a method—mounting a motorized 35mm camera atop a pickup truck and loading it with black and white (and later color) motion picture film—that captured continuous panoramas of one of LA's most famous streets. Largely unknown and unpublished outside of Ruscha's iconic 1966 book, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, these street-view photographs have become visible and available through the digitization efforts of the Getty Research Institute. While these images taken from a moving vehicle record the curious and innovative eye of a major American artist of the late 20th century, they also provide an unmatched record of small-scale urban change on one of the iconic streets in the United States. On Sunset Boulevard, changing natural and built environments trace local, national, and global histories of migration, economic transformation, architectural innovation, and cultural change. In Ruscha's photographs lies a powerful tool for urban history, and Sunset Over Sunset seeks to reveal that history.

A collaborative digital humanities project, Sunset Over Sunset incorporates five years of Ruscha's Sunset Boulevard photographs, one photo set for each decade, between Doheny Road and North Alameda Street. Following the “paste-up” layout method and aesthetic that Ruscha followed in Every Building, the site digitally stitches these photos into continuous strips that retain their distinctive identity as individual images. The ten miles they depict represent just a portion of the 22 miles of Sunset Boulevard that Ruscha photographed and only a sample of Los Angeles's neighborhoods, from West Hollywood to Chinatown. Likewise, despite their unusual duration, they index only a brief timespan of land that has been continuously inhabited for generations, including by the Tongva, Kizh, and Chumash peoples. Still, even through a geographically and temporally limited lens, this dense, largely commercial extent tells vivid stories of how a diverse range of Angelenos have continuously shaped and reshaped their city.

To reveal such tales, the site locates Ruscha's Sunset photographs in space and time and joins them with an array of historical data sources—city directories, the U.S. Census, and local newspapers, among others—to provide greater context for the changes seen decade-by-decade. “All I was after was that store-front plane,” Ruscha once said of his Sunset photographs. Yet looking not just at the façade, but also behind it, proves a revelatory experience.

In the postwar United States, the most dramatic urban development projects involved large-scale change, first funded by the federal government in the guise of urban renewal, interstate highways, and public housing, then increasingly in the form of private-sector-led megaprojects. Understandably, superblock housing developments, stadia, and commercial centers attract attention, but far more common were small-scale gestures, what we call the “redevelopment vernacular.” The appearance of a newspaper box, a sign changed from English to Spanish, or the departure of a tenant remain difficult, if not impossible, to trace in traditional archives; but they all surface here. In creating a research tool that allows easy navigation of Ruscha's images and illuminating related sources, we hope Sunset Over Sunset can enable new directions in understanding the history of cities, the buildings that fill them, and the people who inhabit them.

Using the Site

Sunset Over Sunset comprises four main components. The Panorama view facilitates easy exploration of Ruscha's photographs over these ten miles, navigable by clicking on points along the map, by dragging the photo strips left or right, via the “head west” or “head east” buttons (or the left and right keyboard arrow keys), or by entering addresses and selecting years in the “Search & Filter” menu. Double clicking on an individual photo opens a detailed view of a single image in a pop-up viewer, including the ability to zoom in closely and navigate to the next or previous photo. Selecting an address on the numerical band spanning the Panorama page, or suggested as a “nearby address” in the pop-up photo viewer, brings up a deeper profile of historical data associated with that property. Available resources vary by location but may include Ruscha's photographs, historical occupants, census tract-level demographic data, journalistic coverage, and links to external property databases. Finally, Stories knit together photographs and properties to illuminate histories that have unfolded there, offering a platform to ask, “What story of Sunset do we tell if we tell it through ____?” Gas Stations, banks, restaurants, palm trees, and signs, for example, all reveal specific stories of this street, as well as larger urban histories in decades of extensive global transformation. We invite you to explore these histories and use Sunset Over Sunset to write your own.

Team

Project Directors

• Francesca Russello Ammon, University of Pennsylvania
• Brian D. Goldstein, Swarthmore College
• Garrett Dash Nelson, Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library

Design & Development

• Rob Nelson, Design and Development Lead
• Livia Foldes, Visual design
• Rachel Ng, UX Design
• Andrew Lux, Development
• Walei Sabry, Accessibility Consultant

Stories Editors

• Francesca Russello Ammon
• Brian D. Goldstein

Advisory Board

• Fallon Samuels Aidoo, Tulane University
• Genevieve Carpio, University of California, Los Angeles
• Nathaniel Deines, Getty Digital
• Gabrielle Esperdy, New Jersey Institute of Technology
• Mariana Mogilevich, Urban Omnibus
• Suleiman Osman, George Washington University
• Mark Padoongpatt, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
• Miriam Posner, University of California, Los Angeles
• Emily Pugh, Getty Research Institute
• Jennifer Quick, Independent Scholar
• Alexander Tarr, Worcester State University

Research Assistants

• Dorothy-Rui Corrigan
• Nathaly De La Paz
• Hope Dworkin
• Min Fruman
• Kimberly La Porte
• Elena Moore
• Juliette S. Morfin
• Calvin Nguyen
• Gerardo Ramirez Lopez
• Julian M. Valgora

Institutional Support

Acknowledgments

Our institutional partners, funders, development team, advisory board, and numerous research assistants have enabled us to create Sunset Over Sunset, and we are grateful to all for their generosity and collaborative spirit. In addition, numerous individuals not listed above have played crucial roles in encouraging our ideas and supporting this project both intellectually and administratively. At the Getty Research Institute, we extend special thanks to Zanna Gilbert, Chelsea Anderson, Andrew Perchuk, Emily Pugh, Megan Sallabedra, and Karly Wildenhaus. At Swarthmore College, we are especially grateful to Michelle Crouch, Tania Johnson, Denise Risoli, Deborah Thompson, and Joseph Watson. At the University of Pennsylvania, we wish to thank Jessica DeJesus and Ann Vernon-Grey. Katherine E. Kelly provided essential editorial support. We thank Alison Isenberg for her confidence in and support for this project. Finally, we offer special appreciation and gratitude to Ed Ruscha, whose work—and generosity in letting scholars explore it—has made this site possible.

Citation

Francesca Russello Ammon, Brian D. Goldstein, and Garrett Dash Nelson, Sunset Over Sunset, 2024, accessed April 29, 2025, https://www.sunsetoversunset.org.

Contact

info@sunsetoversunset.org