Edward Ruscha Some Los Angeles Apartments (1970 Second Edition, Classic Artist’s Book, LA Photography)

Description

Ruscha’s Some Los Angeles Apartments remains one of the keystones of postwar conceptual photography, part of the string of understated, quietly radical books the artist began issuing in the 1960s. Though this second edition didn’t appear until 1970, the content is unchanged: a gridded catalog of modest mid-century apartment buildings shot in Ruscha’s uninflected, documentary style. These are the kinds of structures millions of Angelenos lived in—flat-roofed, sun-beaten, resolutely ordinary—and yet Ruscha’s sequencing elevates them into a kind of accidental civic portrait, the architecture of an L.A. still dreaming itself into being.

For anyone who’s ever lived in Los Angeles—and misses it—this book lands with a strange, familiar ache. Ruscha shows the city not as myth or movie set, but as a lived-in landscape made of stucco, rectangles, and shadow. The 1970 edition is prized because it remained faithful to the original’s scale, typography, and spirit while finally making the book accessible beyond the first edition’s relatively small run. A cornerstone Ruscha title and an essential volume for anyone serious about West Coast art, conceptual photobooks, or the architecture of everyday life.

A defining Ruscha work in its faithful 1970 printing—clean, complete, and increasingly scarce in collectible condition (especially with the original glassine present).