Much has been written about Ed Ruscha’s publications. Milestones in the history of postmodern artists’ books, they marked a decisive shift towards industrial offset printing and helped establish the artist’s book as an inexpensive art form. Ruscha’s publications of the 1960s and early 1970s were conceived as conceptual propositions, characterised by the interplay of abundant imagery, minimal captions, and the use of “text-as-image” on their covers. Yet, as simple as they might seem in concept, each book underwent a yearlong gestation, as the artist confessed in a 1973 interview with Willoughby Sharp for Avalanche:

“When I did the books, I had a complete feeling of creation in the same sense that a woman would have a child. I even wrote that down: These books are my children.”

Published in an edition of 3,900 copies, A Few Palm Trees (1971) consists of fourteen black-and-white portraits of anthropomorphic palm trees looking east, straight at a “camera facing west on all photos”, followed by fifteen blank double-spreads. Unlike his other publications, this one has no text on the cover – just glossy black. In terms of content, the book enters into dialogue with the subsequent Colored People (1972), in which fifteen tropical plants, mostly cacti, shot in colour, are likewise followed by blank double-spreads, here numbering sixteen. “I guess at that time I was more involved in botanical phenomena,” the artist says in a conversation with Clive Phillpot for his catalogue raisonné, Éditions 1959–1999 (Walker Art Center). Floating against the white page, the fifteen plants create a rhythmic sequence before the book dissolves into sixteen blank double-spreads.

And in this void, critics and artists have reflected on the racial weight of the title Colored People. Yet perhaps one should not exclude the possibility that the two publications portraying plants as people simply mirror each other: the first in black and white, the second in colour. Seen this way, Ruscha’s tongue-in-cheek approach does not necessarily point so much towards the social and the political as it does towards a deliberately ambiguous play of visual and verbal associations:

“What I was after was no-style or non-statement with a no-style,” states the artist in a famous interview with Henri Man Barendse for Afterimage (February 1981).

This commitment to “non-statement” might be one of the reasons Ruscha stopped making artist’s books in 1972. After Colored People, Ruscha conceived books only in collaboration with other artists, such as Hard Light (1978), made with Lawrence Weiner. It was not until nearly three decades later that he returned to making an artist’s book on his own, with the sculptural ME and THE (2002).