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 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.

Real Estate Opportunities embodies this approach. Its deliberately neutral photographs, restrained typography, and sequential format transform the ordinary into the subject of an artist’s book, while challenging conventional notions of artistic hierarchy and uniqueness. The book documents, through photographs and concise captions, twenty-five tracts of land for sale in different parts of L.A. County. Unlike Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles (1967), for which Ruscha hired Art Alanis to take the photographs, the images for this book were taken by Ruscha himself.

While the book unfolds as a real estate catalogue published on a large scale (4000 copies), the squarish format of the photographs reveals an intentional sophistication. More than a record of real estate ventures, the publication constitutes a topography of the periphery of Los Angeles: Ruscha’s psychogeography in the age of consumerism and pop art. In an interview with Tim Jonze for The Guardian, on the occasion of his Course of Empire exhibition at the National Gallery in London in 2018, Ruscha reflects on the latent and perennial nostalgia for the black-and-white and the visual language of real estate advertising:

“On the one hand we’re supposed to embrace new ideas and aggression, or at least the positive side of aggression, but I don’t want to see the old world go away. I like the black and white world. I equate my growing up and first coming to LA [with the] black and white world. But now we’ve got Vegas everywhere. I saw it just now at Piccadilly Circus … these giant motion graphics. Soon it will be everywhere – in small towns in America and probably England, too, with people using their real estate as possibilities for advertising. It’s scary, but it’s coming.”

The deadpan documentation of Real Estate Opportunities distils the balance between the dryness of its photography and Ruscha’s advocacy of the democratisation of the art object. In doing so, the publication illustrates the artist’s conception of the book as a form that could be both affordable (his publications were originally available for around four dollars) and collectible.