Ed Ruscha

"During the mid 1970s, Ruscha made a series of drawings in pastel using pithy phrases against fields of colour. The sentences and phrases evoke American vernacular and slang, draw attention to a particular experience, or recall the excesses of Hollywood culture. In a number of these works Ruscha draws attention to his own work and to the practice of other conceptually oriented artists working at the time. The monochromatic black and white points to Ruscha’s interest in making books, and particularly those he made dedicated to his series of black and white photographs."

(National Galleries)
The series of Ruscha's photography books, their titles bluntly advertising their contents, struck a chord with me in a way in which the interpretation of any material can be 'misrecognised' to create an ulterior metaphor to the one intended (or not intended) by the artist.

I also realised, in retrospect, that I saw these books in a small exhibition in Berlin over the summer of 2009.