Angel City West, 2nd Volume [Signed]

Hardcover, slipcased
12 × 15"
64 pages
51 duotone plates
Limited edition of 350 numbered and signed copies

“Mark Steinmetz makes photographs of ordinary people in the ordinary landscapes they inhabit. His frames document those fluid moments of real, lived life, moments not just grabbed or stolen, but ones where he says, ‘It’s important to take an internal pause.’

An element of the seeming offhand magic in his photographs is how his sense of this ‘internal pause,’ of a near cinematic freeze frame, only enhances the images’ apparent spontaneity. The best art often hides its technique.

Steinmetz is, in fact, a ‘street’ photographer: a 21st-century embodiment of the 19th-century flâneur, a person moving through the world, sensitive to ephemeral moments as photographic capsules of our larger lives. This will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Steinmetz’s artistic history as a mentee of Garry Winogrand.

You don’t have to be a creature of the urban streetscapes that Steinmetz so closely observes in this book to understand his work. From his books of photographs of Greater Atlanta to the small world of a children’s baseball diamond in The Players, Mark Steinmetz’s camera focuses closely on ordinary, even banal, moments of daily life, even when the people themselves are absent at the instant of exposure.

Like the more formal compositions of Cartier-Bresson, Steinmetz’s photographs capture their own ‘decisive moment’—less stylized, certainly, but often more animated: simply the images of an American photographer.”
— From the introduction by John Bailey

Volume 2 in Mark Steinmetz’s trilogy Angel City West. Building upon the narrative begun with Volume 1, published in NZL Set 2, Steinmetz presents 51 previously unpublished photographs made during his stay in Los Angeles between 1981 and 1984.

John Bailey, renowned cinematographer and expert on the history of cinematography, provides a thoughtful introduction from the perspective of his own chosen medium, as well as that of a Los Angeles native.

Angel City West: Volume 2 is printed in a limited edition of 350 numbered, signed, and slipcased copies.