Los Angeles artist Ed Ruscha's fascination with the "vernacular architecture" of Los Angeles drove him to exhaustively photograph several of the city's arterial streets over a period of more than 40 years. More than a million of his images are now safely guarded in the Getty's Ed Ruscha Streets of Los Angeles Archives, including many continuous photographs that he took with a car-mounted camera. Two sets of these extended photos—one documenting a stretch of Hollywood Boulevard west of Hollywood and Vine in 1973, the other showing that same stretch in 2002—have been hauled out of the archive and turned into the video below from the National Building Museum. The photos line up exactly, showing where a building was or, in some cases, has been all this time. Frederick's of Hollywood, for example, was selling unmentionables in 2002 in the same building it was back in 1973. Sadly, the video doesn't have any narration or music, but would probably be enhanced by any soundtrack of LA-inspired music from either era. (For a different approach to Ruscha's Sunset Boulevard, you can watch him drive the stretch with Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.)
· Ed Ruscha's Hollywood Boulevard, 1973 and 2002 (Modern Architecture in Los Angeles) [NBM]
· Anthony Kiedis and Ed Ruscha Drive the Sunset Strip [Curbed LA]
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