Every Building on the Sunset Strip

What was your inspiration for “Every Building on the Sunset Strip”?

Ruscha: "I came to California in my teenage years, and I discovered Sunset Boulevard, which was a street that was like 27 miles long, and there was a particular part of that that was called the Sunset Strip, which was about two miles long, something like that. I got inspired to document this particular two miles of Sunset Boulevard. in the mid 1960s, and I had an idea to document it in the form of a book, and I didn't know really how to go about it, but I got inspired by a chap that I grew up with who made a very convincing model of Williamsburg, Virginia, and its colonial buildings, and I always thought that somehow I was going to do something similar to that."

How did you go about capturing the photographs for it?

Ruscha: "I took the photographs from a moving automobile, only of the storefront planes of the Sunset Strip. I was interested only in the storefront plane, the facade of the buildings, as though it were all on one little continuous stretch. These pictures were taken, image by image, frame by frame, and they overlapped one another, and so consequently, when cars would go by and I would patch these pictures together, the cars sometimes might be cut in half or in quarters. So it gave the book a kind of, informal appearance, some of the filming was a little on the crude side, but that didn't matter because I was able to capture the storefront plane of the whole thing."

Where did the idea of making it into a folded photo book come from?

Ruscha: "I knew I wanted to make a book out of it, but I didn't know really how I was going to do it. I thought I could do it in a coil, where it's all just one strip, like toilet paper, but then I, had another idea to make it into a, an accordion for book, which you could call a leporello [or a concertina].

I was also encouraged through a book that I found in a used bookstore here in Los Angeles, a kind of a sinister book called “Deutschland Erwache” which translates as “Germany Awakes”. I discovered in this thing in the very back of it is an accordion fold photograph of a Nazi rally in maybe Potsdam or one of those cities. And I thought, wow, this is this could be applied to my book. It was rare to see a feature like this in a book, and so this was an encouraging thought using the idea of this book."

What was the process of turning all those photos into the continuous strip?

Ruscha: "I produced the thing myself with my own funds and, I did all the photographs, and we identified the addresses of each one of these pictures. The top and bottom face each other so that the bottom is upside down, but the buildings on it, correspond with what's on the other side of the page, and they go on like this for, about 27 something feet in length.

The first edition was in 1966, and I think I printed like, 500 copies. And, I made the book sleeve by hand out of silver mylar, and, some other materials that were all pressure sensitive and so this book slides into that. This first edition had an extra little page on it that just had 20 or 30ft more of photograph, and that I found rather essential for the completion of this Sunset Strip idea. And, subsequently I made another edition of like, a thousand, a few years later and, it's a little cleaner, a little nicer, maybe, and, but it does not contain this extra 20 or 30ft of building space. So, it was, very comical putting this thing together and trying to match up the folding scheme and, the adhesion of these pages together, because it had to be done in sheets of printed paper that were cut apart and fitted together, it created quite of a job, as I do remember, so that it lined up very neatly, one slab on top of another."

How many copies of this book exist?

Ruscha: "There are probably 1500 of these things lurking around in existence and, some are in terrible shape of course, by age alone or by mishandling, but there's also some that are you could even consider to be mint condition."

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You can see 'Every Building on the Sunset Strip' in our latest free exhibition – Photo City: How Images Shape the Urban World