Edgar Arceneaux 107th Street Watts 2003 First Edition Artist’s Book

Description

Los Angeles artist Edgar Arceneaux grew up in Watts, and 107th Street Watts turns his attention to the neighborhood not as an outsider documenting an urban landscape, but as someone examining a place bound up with his own history and memory. One volume unfolds into a continuous black-and-white streetscape of modest houses, vacant lots, automobiles and neighborhood architecture; its format deliberately enters into conversation with Ed Ruscha’s landmark 1966 artist’s book Every Building on the Sunset Strip. Where Ruscha’s accordion-fold panorama coolly inventories the commercial architecture of the Sunset Strip, Arceneaux redirects that visual language toward Watts, replacing one of Los Angeles’ most mythologized thoroughfares with a residential neighborhood far less often granted the same sustained photographic attention.

But Arceneaux complicates Ruscha’s detached survey by pairing the panorama with a second volume of text, memory and neighborhood history. The result is not simply a photographic record of a street but an examination of how a place is remembered, represented and changed over time. That two-volume structure is what makes 107th Street Watts particularly compelling: Ruscha’s deadpan photographic vocabulary becomes Arceneaux’s starting point rather than his destination. Published by Revolver in a first edition of 1,000, the set belongs squarely in collections of Los Angeles art, conceptual photography and artist’s books—and makes an especially interesting companion to Every Building on the Sunset Strip.

For the collector who already owns Ruscha’s …Sunset Strip, 107th Street Watts is the book to put beside it: a generation later, another Los Angeles artist takes the same long view down a very different street.