Ed Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Books, Prints, and Photographic Editions 1960–2022 (3 Volumes)

Ed Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Books, Prints, and Photographic Editions 1960–2022 is Steidl's definitive three-volume survey of Ruscha's work as printmaker, photographer, and maker of artists' books, co-published with Gagosian, New York. Across 864 pages and roughly 1,944 reproductions, catalogue entries compiled by curator Siri Engberg — with essays by Engberg, Ruscha, and artist's-book scholar Clive Phillpot — document every book, print, and photographic edition Ruscha produced between 1960 and 2022, alongside his 1975 text "The Information Man," a bibliography, exhibition history, and photographic workshop archives.

Ruscha's books were never precious objects — Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, the deadpan accordion-folds and cheap offset paper were an argument in themselves: that photography could be inventory before it was art, that a parking lot or a Standard station sign held as much information as a monument. 

This catalogue treats that argument with the seriousness it earned decades ago, laying out every cover, every accordion spread, every stray colophon page alongside the prints — lithographs, screenprints, works pulled in gunpowder, blood, Pepto-Bismol, egg yolk — where Ruscha turned single words into landscapes and Los Angeles into a kind of alphabet.

Sixty-two years of a practice that refused to sit still between mediums, indexed at last with the rigor it was always quietly asking for.

A reference for anyone who has ever driven the length of Sunset Boulevard and wondered what Ruscha saw that the rest of us drove past.