Every Building on the Sunset Strip was self-published by Ruscha through the National Excelsior Press in 1966, in an edition of 1,000 copies. The book is unlike any of Ruscha’s previous publications: instead of bound pages, it unfolds as a continuous accordion-fold strip, approximately twenty-seven feet long, containing a photographic panorama of every building on both sides of Sunset Boulevard between Laurel Canyon and Doheny Drive — the famous Sunset Strip.
Ruscha mounted a motorized camera on a pickup truck and drove slowly along the Strip, photographing continuously. The resulting images were assembled into two parallel strips — one for the north side of the street, one for the south (printed upside down, so the reader can flip the book over to follow the other side). Building addresses are printed at intervals along the panorama. The effect is a photographic map of extraordinary literalness: not a selective representation of the Strip but a complete one, including every mundane storefront, parking lot, and blank wall alongside the famous nightclubs and restaurants.
The work anticipated Google Street View by four decades. Ruscha’s systematic, automated photography of an entire streetscape — every building, without selection or editorial judgment — is exactly the methodology that Google would later apply to the entire world. But where Google’s project is utilitarian, Ruscha’s is artistic: by printing the panorama as a long fold-out in a small paperback, he transforms a documentary record into a sculptural object that the viewer physically unfolds and explores.
The Sunset Strip of 1966 is preserved in these photographs: the Whisky a Go Go, the Rainbow Bar and Grill, Schwab’s Pharmacy (long since demolished), and dozens of other establishments that defined the cultural geography of 1960s Los Angeles. The book has become an invaluable historical document as well as an artwork, providing a block-by-block record of a street that has been continuously transformed since the photographs were taken.
Collecting Every Building on the Sunset Strip
First edition (National Excelsior Press, 1966): 1,000 copies, accordion-fold format in slipcase.
Market values:
- First edition, fine with slipcase: $5,000–$20,000
- Second printing (1971): $1,500–$5,000
- Later editions: $200–$800
The most sought-after of Ruscha’s artist books after Twentysix Gasoline Stations. The accordion-fold format is fragile, and many copies have been damaged by unfolding.