Flying A, Kingman, Arizona, 1962 (print 1989)

The titles of Ruscha’s photographs of gasoline stations locate them in specific sites along Route 66, between LA and the artist’s hometown of Oklahoma City. The artist’s casual, laconic snapshot mode underscores the interchange-ability of the gas stations and their vacant surroundings. With foregrounds filled by a stretch of highway, the images have an offhand quality, as if taken from
a car window. Ruscha’s dis-passionate style and banal subject matter bucked the two dominant strains of fine art photography at this time—namely, highly aestheticized, technique-driven photography and muckraking social
documentary photography. Instead, Ruscha drew on the medium’s capacity for mass reproduction. That quality suits his depiction of the kind of endless repetition that characterizes an American landscape punctuated by corporate emblems and brand names.