Ed Ruscha Was Right

In 1965, Ed Ruscha declared that “photography is dead as a fine art.” It sounds dramatic, but what he meant was something much more subtle—and strangely prophetic.

Ruscha wasn’t dismissing photography altogether. He was pointing to a shift. For him, the magic wasn’t in the hand-crafted print—the silver gelatin, the darkroom perfection—but in the image itself. The idea behind it. A picture could live in a magazine, on a billboard, or even a cheap Xerox, and still hold artistic weight. The artistry wasn’t in the print—it was in the seeing.

Fast forward to now, where AI can generate images that are flawless, uncanny, endless. Making images isn’t the challenge anymore. The challenge is choosing what to make—and why.

I keep coming back to what Ruscha said about the simplicity of it all: “Anybody can go out and just go ‘snap.’” But it’s still the person behind the camera (or the prompt, or the pen) who makes it art. Ruscha was always looking at the overlooked—gas stations, parking lots, Hollywood signs—and lifting them into poetry by simply noticing.

It’s a good reminder, especially now: the tools will keep changing, but the eye—what you choose to see—still matters most.