This animated illustration is based on photographs taken by Edward Ruscha, some of which were included in his landmark 1966 book, Every Building on the Sunset Strip.
Ruscha’s book is itself part of a larger project in which he and his team have systematically, and repeatedly over decades, photographed long stretches of Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards in Los Angeles. The first shoot, on which this work is based, took place in 1966, and is the one from which Ruscha’s book was derived. But the Sunset Strip is just a short (1.5 mile) segment of the much-longer stretch of Sunset Boulevard that Ruscha and his team have photographed. The images are taken from a slightly elevated position as they were shot from a camera mounted four feet above the bed of a pickup truck. Ruscha has said he wanted to show the “cookie cutter” architecture of Los Angeles, which reminded him of a film set.
In this project I use animation as an alternative means of showing the flatness and linearity of mid-century Los Angeles commercial architecture. The idea is to render it in the “wraparound background” style of cartoons from that same era, such as those by Hanna-Barbera, which often used a “repeated pan” to show a streaming background as (for example) characters in a car drove past it. To enhance the sense of flatness, buildings are represented with large blocks of color, and many details from the reference photos are omitted.
What is left, after many details are excluded, is a lot of text from signage. The architecture is not particularly distinctive, so it is the signs that carry most of the information about the functions or activities associated with various locations along the Boulevard. Taken together, they catalog people’s needs and preoccupations at this time and in this place. And there is often humor in the juxtaposition of adjacent businesses (such as Reagan’s campaign headquarters being located next to a strip club).
The extensive collection of photos Ruscha has assembled were recently donated to, and are being digitized by, the Getty Research Institute. For this project I used as references some photos from the June 11 1966 session, a subset of which Ruscha used as the basis for his book. The Getty has digitized 6540 negatives from this session, which come in 13-frame strips. The strips themselves are not organized into any sort of sequential order. So we can be sure that photos within a strip are successive, but making connections across strips is much more challenging.
For my purposes, I only tried to assemble short stretches of connected buildings, and was not concerned with placing them in a larger context that accurately reflects geographical position. Within the animation, then, the buildings are not placed in correct geographical sequence and are, in fact, taken from both sides of the street. To me this seems fine as the goal is not to create a map but to create an impression.
For the animation I used an aspect ratio of 2.6 : 1. The goal was to reinforce the sense of linearity and allow a fair bit of the streetscape to be shown all at once. This particular aspect ratio was used in Cinerama theatres, which was at the cutting edge of widescreen film projection in the 1960s. Appropriately enough, the animation includes a “drive” past a Cinerama movie theatre.
In contrast to their contemporary status at the time Ruscha recorded them, now that 50 years have passed the photos offer significant historical value. Another function of the animation, then, is a kind of time travel as we “drive” along Sunset in 1966. The simple forms and consistent color palette used in the animation reinforce the schematized, and often nostalgic, viewpoint we adopt today as we look back in time to what is perhaps the peak of post-war consumer affluence and middle-class expansion.