Real Estate Opportunities was self-published by Ruscha through the National Excelsior Press in 1970, in an edition of 4,000 copies. The book contains twenty-five photographs of vacant lots in Los Angeles, each captioned with the lot’s address and the phone number of the realtor handling the sale. The photographs are in color — a departure from the black-and-white of Ruscha’s earlier books — and they show scrubby, unpromising patches of dirt and weeds, marked with “For Sale” signs, scattered across the Los Angeles basin.
The conceptual joke is layered. By presenting vacant lots as “opportunities,” Ruscha adopts the optimistic language of real estate promotion and applies it to patches of empty ground that are, by any conventional aesthetic standard, ugly and uninteresting. The phone numbers add a layer of reality — these were actual listings, and readers could (and presumably did) call the numbers to inquire about the properties. The book thus occupies an ambiguous space between artwork and advertisement, between documentation and commerce.
The passage of time has added meaning. The vacant lots of 1970 have long since been built upon — they are now apartments, strip malls, office buildings, parking structures. Ruscha’s photographs preserve a Los Angeles that no longer exists: a city with empty spaces, with undeveloped land within the urban boundary, with the possibility of transformation. The “real estate opportunities” of the title have been realized, and the lots themselves are gone.
Collecting Real Estate Opportunities
First edition (National Excelsior Press, 1970): 4,000 copies, perfect-bound paperback.
Market values:
- First edition, fine: $800–$2,500
- Later printings: $150–$400