Some Los Angeles Apartments was self-published by Ruscha through the National Excelsior Press in 1965, in an edition of 700 copies. The book contains black-and-white photographs of apartment buildings across Los Angeles — the stucco dingbats, the mid-century courtyard complexes, the anonymous boxes that house most of the city’s population. Each photograph is captioned with the building’s address. There is nothing else.
The buildings Ruscha chose are aggressively ordinary — the kind of apartment buildings that Los Angeles produces by the thousands, identical in their materials (stucco, concrete block, steel balconies) if not in their details. They are the opposite of architectural landmarks: they are the background of the city, the buildings you drive past without seeing. By photographing them with the same neutral attention he had given to gas stations, Ruscha performed a Duchampian gesture — selecting ordinary objects and, by the act of selection, transforming them into art.
But the book also functions as an architectural document. The Los Angeles apartment buildings of the 1950s and 1960s — now often called “dingbats” after their resemblance to a typographic term for anonymous ornament — have become an object of architectural study and preservation interest. Ruscha’s photographs, taken when these buildings were new and unremarkable, now serve as a record of a vanishing urban landscape, as many have been demolished or renovated beyond recognition.
The serial format — building after building, address after address — creates a cumulative portrait of Los Angeles as a city of repetition and anonymity, where the built environment reflects not individual expression but the standardized production of shelter for a rapidly growing population. This reading was not Ruscha’s intention (he has consistently resisted interpretive readings of his books), but it is one that the passage of time has made unavoidable.
Collecting Some Los Angeles Apartments
First edition (National Excelsior Press, 1965): 700 copies, perfect-bound paperback.
Market values:
- First edition, fine: $3,000–$10,000
- Later printings: $500–$1,500
- Facsimile editions: $15–$40