I’ve recently been reading a great book titled Photography After Conceptual Art, edited by Costello and Iversen. The second chapter of this book focusses on the auto-maticity of Ed Ruscha and performative photography. “Performative photography begins with an instruction or rule which is followed through with a performance.” This mode of photographic operation can been seen in Ruscha’s early photographic books such as Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1963 and Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966. In the first of these project Ruscha decided to drive the historic Route 66 and photograph every gas station along the way. The photographs were made in a straight forward fashion as if presenting the data or proof of following instruction.

In the later, Ruscha mounted a camera to the side of his car and systematically photographed every building with a forensic like repetition of perspective and point of view. He presented the pictures in an accordeon book wrapped in silver foil. He’s shown below holding this book extended.

The author notes that photographs are “best viewed as the outcome of a rule-governed performance” and that the “pervasive auto-maticity…maybe something like a hybrid of current American [1960s] and early avant-garde French artistic trends,’ such as those begun by Marcel Duchamp.

I find the work very inspirational, providing a mode of photographing less focused the modernist idea that the photographer will go out into the world and have a revealing personal experience communicated through art, and more on the idea that the  photographic process and aesthetic can be ontological and reflexive of broader structural systems. In speaking about photography, Iverson quotes Rucha refering at one point to it’s “inhuman aspect, as it records without making qualitative judgments.” I’ve included some of his paintings from that time.