Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles was self-published by Ruscha through the National Excelsior Press in 1967, in an edition of 2,000 copies (the largest print run of his artist books to that date). The photographs were taken from a rented helicopter by the photographer Art Alanis, working under Ruscha’s direction. Each image shows a Los Angeles parking lot from directly above: the painted lines, the scattered cars (in some lots full, in others nearly empty), the stains of oil and rubber, and the surrounding streets and buildings at the edges of the frame.
The aerial viewpoint transforms the subject. Seen from above, parking lots become abstract compositions — grids of white lines on dark asphalt, punctuated by the bright rectangles of car roofs. The photographs have the formal qualities of minimalist painting (Agnes Martin’s grids, Frank Stella’s stripes) while remaining stubbornly representational: these are real parking lots, with real cars and real oil stains, photographed at a real moment in time.
The social commentary is inadvertent but inescapable. Los Angeles in the 1960s devoted more land to parking than to any other single use, and Ruscha’s photographs make this visible with a clarity that no amount of urban planning data could achieve. The sheer scale of the parking lots — Dodger Stadium alone occupies multiple pages — is a fact about American civilization that the book presents without comment but cannot disguise.
Ruscha has always resisted the interpretation of his books as social criticism, and in one sense he is right: the parking lots were chosen not for their sociological significance but for their visual qualities as seen from above. But art exceeds its creator’s intentions, and Thirtyfour Parking Lots has become, among other things, a document of a particular moment in American car culture — the moment when the parking lot, the freeway, and the gas station had become the defining features of the American landscape.
Collecting Thirtyfour Parking Lots
First edition (National Excelsior Press, 1967): 2,000 copies, perfect-bound paperback.
Market values:
- First edition, fine: $2,000–$6,000
- Later editions: $300–$800