Multiple collections focus on the architecture and other aspects of Los Angeles’s built environment as well as on its lively art scene. These are dominated by the archival holdings of the artist, Ed Ruscha, comprising his systematic exploration of the streets of the city, amounting to over a million images. Informed by the distinctive urban infrastructure and signage of Los Angeles, Ruscha's project spans more than forty years and documents many major streets, including Melrose Avenue, Pacific Coast Highway, and the iconic Sunset Boulevard. A complete set of the artist’s self-published books chronicling the shoots, as well as related production materials are housed in the Library.
Earlier collections recording the urban environment include photographs from 1939 showing the Wyvernwood Garden Apartments in Boyle Heights, east of downtown, and public housing projects documented by Leonard Nadel in the 1940s and 1950s, including Pueblo del Rio, an all African-American community, and Aliso Village, the first integrated development in Los Angeles. Both reflect in part the demand for housing by the city’s growing multi-ethnic population. The commercial expansion of the city is captured in a 1955 survey of Wilshire Boulevard by an unidentified photographer that includes billboards, gas stations, store fronts and the street’s extensive residential accommodation. A further collection charts the construction of the Hollywoodland housing development in the Hollywood hills during the 1920s. The city’s domestic architecture is also recorded photographically in several mid twentieth-century collections, including those of the architects C. Gregory Walsh and Welton Becket. Lastly, Linear City, an aerial photographic project by Lane Barden, was created as a twenty-first-century overview of the city’s vast infrastructure to serve as a blueprint for the future.
The papers of major Los Angeles architects and architectural historians are held at the GRI, most of which contain extensive photographic documentation. These include Frank Gehry and Reyner Banham, as well as the Southern California architects Franklin D. Israel, Ray Kappe, Pierre Koenig, William Krisel, and Frederic Lyman. Gehry’s building of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Downtown Los Angeles is extensively documented by the photographers Federico Zignani and Grant Mudford. The archive, of the influential architectural photographer, Julius Shulman includes more than 260,000 images. A different aspect of the city’s built environment is presented in a selection of 382 files documenting commercial and residential sites mainly in the city (1982-2009), commissioned as pre-production planning by local television companies and film studios.
Los Angeles’ art scene is extensively covered at the GRI, both in the work of photographers such as Harry Drinkwater, Charles Brittin, Malcolm Lubliner, and Jerry McMillan, as well as in the activities of Los Angeles-based artists, curators, and galleries, such as George Herms, Hal Glicksman, the Iturralde Gallery, Margo Leavin Gallery, and the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions organization. The city’s radical artistic heritage is represented in several archives such as that of L.A. Artists for Survival, an anti-nuclear group from the early 1980s, the performance art collective, the Waitresses, or the activities of the Woman’s Building.
The GRI houses a large number of books and artists’ books relating to Los Angeles, including significant projects by the photographers Sophie Calle, Michael Light, Daido Moriyama, Stephen Shore, and Deborah Sussman.
Image: Unknown Photographer. Hollywoodland. Ca. 1923-1929. Albumen print. Getty Research Institute, 2011.R.10-12.