Angels Point is a cliff’s edge in Elysian Park, the oldest park in Los Angeles, and the title of Adam Ianniello’s book of photographs. Ianniello began working there in 2017 with a large-format camera, returning over three years to make the black-and-white pictures gathered here. The park sits above Chavez Ravine, land that has been, at different times, a Jewish cemetery, a rock quarry, and a rural Mexican-American neighborhood demolished and buried beneath Dodger Stadium. Those histories remain in the ground, and the photographs show the traces and artifacts of those who have passed through: hideaways, forgotten objects, strangers.

The book follows a sequence rather than a survey. It opens with a chance encounter with a man named Angel, then tracks his imagined path through the park, pausing where he might pause, before exiting at dusk. That structure echoes Ianniello’s own experiences of walking through Angels Point, stopping to photograph along the way as he learned to use the view camera. The park’s environment afforded him the anonymity to wander with a tripod without feeling out of place. Working slowly, against the current era of instant image production, he let the narrative be guided by nature rather than by the park’s passing visitors.

The large-format medium references the landscape photography of the past while the images themselves bear witness to contemporary life. The photographs capture the lesser-seen sublime in the midst of one of America’s largest cities. Published by GOST Books in 2022 as an 88-page hardback, Angels Point presents a sustained three-year body of work in which landscape, local history, and a chance encounter are folded into one another.