Independent Art and Photography - Edward Ruscha's books

Although Edward Ruscha was not featured in the New Topographics exhibition, his work does seem to fit into the same style of photography. Ruscha is recognised for creating books that do exactly as they say on the front cover - the book titled Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1962) consists of 26 images of petrol stations, nothing more, nothing less. He does not document with the highly regimented style of the Bechers, but the images are all shot with relatively similar lighting, only slightly varying composition and all printed black and white with a relatively low contrast.

A similar theme is carried through in Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966). Again, Ruscha has documented exactly what he has said he is going to document, and displays the images in a panorama style, but without trying to stitch them together too seamlessly. In this book, he has moved away from traditional pages in favour of a concertina style, where the viewer can fold out all the pages and see a scaled down, but otherwise relatively accurate, representation of the Sunset Strip. There is very little text involved - only the title, name and date, and then the number of each of the buildings on the road. This book fascinates me - Ruscha has taken something quite mundane, then documented it in so much detail that the viewer is forced to pay attention to every single aspect of it. The place has been photographed very cooly, in a very detatched manner, just showing the audience the pure and simple facts of what it looks like.

For me, Ruscha's work is very simple, but very effective. He appears to have set himself challenges of things to photograph - Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass (1968) or Thirtyfour Parking Lots (1967), for example, and then followed through and presented them in photographs that attempt to portray them just as they are. This theme links into the New Topographic style - documenting things just for documentary's sake, trying not to place any of the photographer's own preconceptions onto the work.
For me, this is where I struggle. Although I see links between the style of photography seen in the New Topographics show and my own, I cannot deny that the images I take have been taken because of an emotion I feel about the subject. Although the images may look detached, they come as a result of knowing a city inside out, and feeling positive emotions towards it. I can't simply pretend that there are no emotions attached, so to progress with this project I need to find a fine balance between documenting the place, or documenting the nostalgia I feel about the place.