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. But as simple as they might seem in concept, each book underwent a yearlong gestation, as the artist stated in an interview with Willoughby Sharp for Avalanche in 1973:

“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 2,143 copies, Thirtyfour Parking Lots embodies his early 1960s editorial philosophy. Tautological in its conception, the edition contains precisely what its title announces. But unlike his other books, in which Ruscha took the photographs himself, for this one he hired Art Alanis to take professional aerial views of the parking lots from a helicopter. Also, the format is larger than that of his first three books, and the reason is simple:

“I got the photographs back from the photographer and he’d made beautiful 8-by-10 glossy blowups. It was amazing that I’d gotten this guy to go up there and shoot the whole thing and give me the negatives for $250. He’d hired the helicopter and everything. I got the photographs back and was floored by them. I couldn’t bring myself to reduce those photographs to fit the original format,” confesses the artist in a famous interview with Henri Man Barendse for Afterimage (February 1981).

The book unfolds through a rhythmic layout of squarish black-and-white photographs and concise captions, aligning conceptually and graphically with his previous books, Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1962), Various Small Fires and Milk (1964), and Some Los Angeles Apartments (1965). This emphasis on uniformity, mechanical precision, and mass production is central to Ruscha’s conception of the artist’s book. Rather than treating the book as a unique or handcrafted object, he approaches it as a reproducible work whose meaning is inseparable from its serial form and industrial mode of production. Through Thirtyfour Parking Lots, Ruscha reveals a distinctly West American form of psychogeography.