IN DIALOGUE WITH ED RUSCHA

Ed Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) is a landmark artist’s book made up of exactly 26 black-and-white snapshots of gasoline stations taken along the highway between Los Angeles and Oklahoma City, presented with minimal text simply naming each station and its location. The work deliberately adopts a neutral, almost deadpan style with direct frontal compositions, sparse context, and virtually no human presence, turning everyday roadside architecture into a serial study of banal infrastructure and the American landscape with a conceptual rigor that helped define the modern artist’s book.

     In contrast, 37 Garages from Sawant Photography is a contemporary series documenting garage facades—a sequence of images that catalog a specific architectural typology in a similar serial and systematic manner. While Ruscha’s work focuses on gas stations as markers of mobility and the roadside experience, 37 Garages frames garages as everyday urban or suburban structures. Both projects share a foundational strategy of isolating repetitive, utilitarian forms and presenting them in series so that subtle formal variations—shape, signage, texture, light, and shadow—start to become the primary subject rather than any narrative or expressive moment.

     Ruscha’s book institutionalized the neutral photographic approach: images are void of romantic framing or dramatic lighting and instead operate almost as factual documents, making the viewer aware of visual and cultural patterns through repetition and sequence. In a similar spirit, 37 Garages treats garages not as background detail but as sites of visual interest through their ordinary material presence, encouraging viewers to perceive architectural nuance and cultural specificity in otherwise overlooked built environments. Where Ruscha’s work is anchored in the historical and cultural context of Route 66 and American postwar mobility, 37 Garages extends the conceptual premise into a different context—a contemporary European urban setting, framing garages as the mundane but visually engaging thresholds between private and public life. Both series transform typologies of everyday architecture into serial typological studies that foreground structure, context, and repetition over anecdotal storytelling.