Great news! Ed Ruscha's expansive love letter to Los Angeles, is now newly digitized and accessible at 12sunsets.getty.edu via his archive of street views of LA which he began with Every Building on the Sunset Strip, a small but ultimately very moving and powerful book documenting the city in his own idiosyncratic way: from the back of a pick up truck.

The original slim volume from 1966 was egalitarian and clear-eyed: the city was younger, brasher, and not New York, but it gave me the first real perspective on why it could be just as intriguing. Ed expanded this effort over the years to include other streets, but for me the Sunset Strip is still the foundational work in the series.

Shuttling as I have for most of my life between the two cities, I understood through Ed's holistic, ongoing efforts what low rise, often generic, yet distinctive amalgam of architecture made up LA, and why it mattered. The Getty acquired his archive of the actual imagery plus all the ephemera surrounding his creation, and now, in a fully searchable database, you can pick your year, your street, your view.

LA is still in lockdown. As Europe and New York have opened up, it's been a real challenge to find the here here in the city. That the Getty would offer up this very wonderful archive to us right now is a true gift.

(If you want to know more about Ed and his merry band of bad boy artist colleagues Ed Moses, Billy Al Bengston and Larry Bell during the early years of the LA Cool School, please go to Wallpaper and check out their archive where you will see my story and a video in which they tell about these wild years in the LA art world)