Ed Ruscha - Los Angeles Apartments, First Edition, Steidl, 2013, Sealed

A sealed first edition of Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles Apartments, published by Steidl in 2013 to accompany the exhibition of the same name at Kunstmuseum Basel. The publication revisits one of the defining subjects of Ruscha’s early photographic practice: the anonymous apartment architecture of Southern California. In 1965, Ruscha published Some Los Angeles Apartments, the third of his seminal photographic artist’s books, while simultaneously developing a group of ten related drawings based directly on photographs he had taken of Los Angeles apartment buildings. Steidl Verlag Edited by Christian Müller, Los Angeles Apartments brings together photographs, preparatory studies and finished drawings, revealing the close relationship between photography and drawing within Ruscha’s working process. The book also includes photographs from his 1962 Gasoline Stations series, including imagery connected to the iconic painting Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas of 1963. Steidl Verlag By placing these different media in direct dialogue, the publication offers an unusually focused view of Ruscha’s movement between documentary observation, graphic reduction, realism and abstraction. The repetitive façades, anonymous architecture and deadpan perspective that characterize these works would become fundamental to both Ruscha’s own visual language and the broader development of conceptual photography and the artist’s book. Published in a green clothbound hardcover with a photographic cover image, the book has since gone out of print. This example remains sealed and unused, making it particularly appealing as a collectible Ed Ruscha publication. Steidl itself now lists both editions as out of print.