A Few Palm Trees was self-published by Ruscha through the National Excelsior Press in 1971, in an edition of 3,900 copies. The book contains fourteen color photographs of palm trees in and around Los Angeles, each photographed from below against the sky. The trees are isolated — no buildings, no other vegetation, no context beyond the blue sky and the occasional power line. Each photograph is captioned with the tree’s location.
The palm tree is the unofficial symbol of Los Angeles — the most recognizable feature of its landscape, planted by the thousands along its boulevards in the early twentieth century. But Ruscha’s palm trees are not the glamorous palms of Hollywood mythology: they are real trees, many of them scraggly and wind-battered, photographed not for their beauty but for their existence as elements of the urban landscape. The deadpan treatment is consistent with Ruscha’s other books: the subject is ordinary, the photography is neutral, and the art lies in the act of selection and presentation.
Yet the book is genuinely beautiful in a way that Gasoline Stations and Parking Lots are not. The palm trees, photographed from below, become abstract forms — their fronds spreading like calligraphy against the sky, their trunks rising like columns. The color photography, still relatively unusual in Ruscha’s book work, gives the images a warmth and luminosity that the black-and-white books lack. A Few Palm Trees is the most accessible and immediately pleasurable of Ruscha’s artist books, and it has become one of the most popular.
The book also functions as a botanical record. Los Angeles’s palm trees — many of them Mexican fan palms planted in the 1930s — are aging and dying, and the city has largely stopped replacing them. Ruscha’s photographs preserve specific trees at specific locations that may no longer exist.
Collecting A Few Palm Trees
First edition (National Excelsior Press, 1971): 3,900 copies, perfect-bound paperback.
Market values:
- First edition, fine: $800–$2,000
- Later editions: $150–$400