Landscape in Motion: Picturing Hollywood’s Renewal in Ed Ruscha’s Then and Now

In 1986, the Community Redevelopment Agency of Los Angeles instituted a thirty-year, billion dollar urban revitalization plan in Hollywood, California. Since then, the Hollywood Redevelopment Project (HRP) has capitalized on the city’s connection to stardom, movies, and entertainment as a means to reshape a built environment previously associated with poverty, homelessness, and vice. This paper will explore the role of historic representations of the city and their effect on shaping current redevelopment efforts. Specifically, it will examine the work of iconic Los Angeles artist Ed Ruscha who, for over four decades, has photographed the streets and boulevards in Hollywood creating a compelling visual archive of a landscape in transition.

Ruscha released Every Building on the Sunset Strip in 1966 and it became the most famous of a series of photography books he produced over a fifteen-year period. Bound accordion-style and unfolding to a length of twenty-seven feet, Ruscha’s text reveals a continuous panorama of Sunset Boulevard between Laurel Canyon and Cory Street. Recently, Ruscha updated this project with the publication of Then & Now (2005), another serialized panorama taken along a twelve-mile stretch of Hollywood Boulevard in 1973. Like Every Building on the Sunset Strip, the photographs displayed at the top and bottom of the pages represent the north and south sides of the street respectively. Between these two strips are wedged a corresponding serialized panorama taken in 2004. Thus, two historical moments are aligned and juxtaposed to one another, so that readers can instantly compare the changes to the urban landscape that have taken place over the thirty year time span. By analyzing the book’s depiction of Hollywood’s urban landscape, this paper will ask whether Then & Now presents a counter-narrative to Hollywood’s ongoing urban revitalization project and the slow but steady gentrification of the city.