Abstract
The word most often used to describe Ed Ruscha's photographic books – and a good stretch of conceptual and post‐conceptual photography in the wake of his practice – is ‘deadpan’. The ambition of this essay is to see if this term has any purchase on what makes this photographic work so compelling. I pay particular attention to the vocabulary of indifference, fact, and facticity that is raised whenever Ruscha's books are under discussion. This vocabulary is also central to Martin Heidegger's philosophy, and plays a crucial role in his consideration of the way mood reveals and modulates our way of being in the world. I explore how these thoughts intersect with Stanley Cavell's intriguing account of the ‘philosophical mood’ of Buster Keaton's deadpan humour and vision of the world – marked by his peculiar openness and evenness of response to it – and what that might reveal about Ruscha's photography and its vision of the world.
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