A collaboration between Ed Ruscha and Billy Al Bengston from 1968, Business Cards wittily documents a business card exchange project, starting with the artists designing the cards and ending with a ceremonial exchange at the Bistro restaurant in Beverly Hills. Limited to one thousand unique copies, the volume features a black-and-white photograph adhered to the wood-grained Bristol board cover with photo corners and is bound with a knotted leather cord. The artists’ business cards are stapled to the final pages of the book.
In this first and only edition, Ruscha indirectly addresses the discourse around the term “colored people” by paradoxically depicting no literal persons anywhere. Instead, the first half of the book consists of fifteen offset color photos of cacti, succulents, palms, banana trees, and other desert vegetation, stripped of context and suspended against immaculate white. Completely blank, the glue-bound book’s remainder is further devoid of even these estranged specimens. Much can be read into this prickly publication in terms of (in)visibility, metaphor, alienation, representation, absence, and so on.
A complete panoramic pictorial compilation of every building on Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, California.
A collaborative photo narrative divided into nine chapters, following the actions of three actors, Shelley Chamberlain, Suzanne Chandler, and Susan Haller. There is only one line of text in the narrative, "In the year 2000 all racecar driving will be taken over by women".
Second edition, 2000 copies, 1976.
"First edition, 1963, 400 numbered copies ; second edition, 1967, 500 unnumbered copies ; third edition, 1969, 3000 unnumbered copies"—Colophon.
"Second edition, 3000 copies, 1970"—Verso, title page Contains photographic images of fires, including a gas range, a cigarette, a pipe, a cigar, a blow torch, a highway flare and others; the final image is of a glass of milk.