Hermann Zschiegner
Monday, 20 July 2009
The original book contains 34 areal views of empty parking lots taken by areal photographer Art Alanis. The aerials were taken during a one-and-a-half-hour shoot on a Sunday morning, when the lots were empty resulting in a survey of the Los Angeles urban landscape of the late sixties.
Ruscha included a detailed address for all but one parking lot, the only text that accompanied the pictures, thus the book became a roadmap to revisit the original places, transforming the original book into a programmatic device for my project ‘Thirtyfour Parking Lots on Google Earth’.
Using Google Earth I simply typed in the exact addresses for each parking lot featured in the original book and took a screenshot from the resulting image query. I substituted Ruscha’s black and white images with the color screenshots, not changing any other aspect of the original book. I applied the same logic of using Google as my only image source and did a search for the original book cover and found a low-res image from the artnet database.” – Hermann Zschiegner