From Prints to Pixels

Swarthmore College and the University of Pennsylvania have announced the launch of Sunset Over Sunset. The immersive website, co-produced by Brian D. Goldstein, associate professor of art history at Swarthmore College; Francesca Russello Ammon, associate professor of city and regional planning and historic preservation at Weitzman; and Garrett Dash Nelson, president and head curator at the Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library, builds on the Getty Research Institute’s newly-digitized archive of Ed Ruscha's landmark series of Los Angeles photographs to examine changes along Sunset Boulevard from 1966 to 2007.

Sunset Over Sunset brings together thousands of Ruscha’s photographs, demographic data culled from the US Census and city directories, municipal building records, and historic news coverage to provide a multilayered view of the urban transformation of Los Angeles. In focusing on LA, the website provides a new tool for tracing local, national, and global histories of migration, economic transformation, architectural innovation, and cultural change in the late twentieth century. Images of facades–and the data behind the facades–reveal how small-scale changes contributed significantly to the evolution of cities, challenging the common focus on large-scale development to also highlight the cumulative impact of individual and community actions.

An urban historian’s version of Google Street View, Sunset Over Sunset takes visitors on a block-by-block tour of one of the country’s most iconic thoroughfares to raise questions about what changed and why that have implications for community and economic development, historic preservation, and urban design today. The original scholarship includes a series of essays by Mark Padoongpatt, Alexander Tarr, and AnneMarie Kooistra, as well as forthcoming essays by Goldstein, Ammon, Michael Amezcua, Annie Berke, Max Böhner, Margaret Crawford, and Elizabeth Goodspeed.

Focusing on the site’s content and contexts, they elucidate stories of Sunset, and the modern city, including Thai and Latinx immigration, banking and globalization, transportation and climate change, place-making, and the advent of now-familiar urban types, like the mini-mall.

The collaboration between scholars of art and architectural history, urban planning and historic preservation, social and cultural history, and digital humanities demonstrates the potential for multimedia storytelling to advance the study of urban environments and provide access to information that could serve community members as well as scholars and policy makers.

Sunset Over Sunset was made possible by a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities; the support and generosity of the Getty Research Institute, which houses Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles Archive; and institutional support from Swarthmore College, the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design, and the Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library.

On March 11, Penn presents a virtual launch event featuring several of the scholars behind the project, including the project co-directors; Rob Nelson, director of the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond, and the project’s lead web designer and developer, and historian Mark Padoongpatt, associate professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and author of one of the featured stories.