Ed Ruscha and Some Los Angeles Apartments (Getty Trust Publications)

This is a superbly illustrated look at the evolution of the photographic work of Ed Ruscha - the quintessential Los Angeles artist. Los-Angeles based contemporary artist Ed Ruscha is celebrated for his paintings, drawings, prints, and artist's books, receiving widespread critical acclaim for more than half a century. Capturing the quintessential Los Angeles experience with its balance of the banal and beautiful, his photobooks of the 1960s - such as TwentySix Gasoline Stations and Some Los Angeles Apartments - are known for their deadpan cataloguing of the city's functional architecture. This volume features 38 Ruscha plates and an essay that traces the evolution of the artist's thinking about his photographs initially as the means to end, and eventually as works of art in and of themselves.