Joe's Car #2

Ed Ruscha’s paintings, photographs, and photobooks utilize the impersonal, banal, and random as sources of inspiration. Seen here is the Plymouth car owned by Joe Goode, a fellow artist and longtime friend of Ruscha’s from Oklahoma; this work was made in 1960, the year both artists graduated from the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. The image has been doubled and mounted to board to emphasize both the photograph’s easy reproducibility as well as its objectlike qualities. Ruscha used images of this car repeatedly: pairing it as here, featuring it in a grid, even attaching it to a post outdoors and photographing the result.