Hardcover, slipcased
380 × 305 mm
64 pages
58 duotone plates
Limited edition of 350 numbered and signed copies
“I entered the Yale School of Art straight from college and left after my first semester. I was 21. I was restless, curious about the America that lay beyond New England, and had a strong interest in the movie industry; I also had heard that Garry Winogrand was somewhere in Los Angeles, so in the summer of 1983 I headed west.”
— Mark Steinmetz, from the preface
Angel City West offers a touching and highly personal look at Los Angeles through the eyes of Mark Steinmetz as a young artist just out of school. In his preface, Steinmetz describes living in a studio apartment in the Miracle Mile district, with a futon surrounded by a dozen roach motels and a makeshift darkroom set up in a small nook off the bathroom.
It was not long before he encountered Garry Winogrand, for whom he became a kind of unofficial chauffeur, allowing Winogrand to photograph through the car window while Steinmetz navigated the streets of his new hometown.
Viewed together in book form, the 58 photographs presented in Angel City West document Steinmetz’s process of finding his own voice as an artist. In light of the later projects for which he became widely known, this early series of street photographs, informal portraits, and landscapes anticipates the sometimes humorous, often melancholic, and always poignant atmosphere that characterizes his work.
Mark Steinmetz’s photographs have been exhibited extensively throughout the United States and Europe and are held in the permanent collections of many major institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.