In the summer of 1983, Mark Steinmetz left the Yale School of Art after a single semester and drove west. He was twenty-one, restless, drawn to the movie industry, and curious about an America beyond New England. In Los Angeles he rented a studio apartment in the Miracle Mile, improvised a darkroom in a nook beside the bathroom, and started photographing. He soon met Garry Winogrand, and for a time served as an unofficial driver, steering the car while Winogrand worked through the window. Angel City West: Volume One gathers the pictures Steinmetz made there in 1983 and 1984, before the projects that would establish his reputation.
The book holds fifty-eight duotone plates: street photographs, informal portraits, and landscapes. Read as a group, they register a young artist working toward a voice of his own, and the mood he would later refine—humor edged with sadness, ordinary people in ordinary settings, moments caught on the wing—is already in evidence. These pictures also stand independently as a portrait of a particular city at a particular moment. Steinmetz supplies a preface that sets the autobiographical frame without explaining the images away.
Nazraeli Press issued the volume in 2015 as part of its NZ Library, Set Two. It appears in hardcover with a slipcase, twelve by fifteen inches, sixty-four pages, the plates printed in duotone. Both scale and binding belong to the tradition of the considered photography monograph, in which format and printing shape how a sequence of images is read. According to the publisher, the limited edition runs to 350 numbered and signed copies.
The book documents Steinmetz’s first sustained body of work, undertaking it well before the projects for which he became known. His photographs are held by institutions including The Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. The publisher describes it as Steinmetz’s ninth monograph with Nazraeli, and its title places it at the head of the Angel City West volumes, of which two further titles appeared in 2017 and 2019. Early work, autobiographical text, and substantial production together give it a particular place in a library of postwar American street photography.
