Southwest Traveler: Indian Arts and Crafts Book

The introduction by Margit Rowell is informative and blessedly free of post-structural jargon. It focuses on Ruscha's use of photography as a part of a practice of art that moves in stages. Yet, it also allows for his photographic work, and the books-as-objects that contains it, as an artistic accomplishment in and of itself, as well as a source of inspiration for other artists whose primary medium is photography.

The book, which is mostly a collection of plates from a show at the Whitney, could have been more generous with the size of the images. Many are painfully tiny. Still, it is a better than decent representation of Ruscha's photographic art covering all of his books and many images taken before his method became clear to him.