Michael Dressel has photographed the streets of Los Angeles since settling there, and Los(t) Angeles gathers work made between 2014 and 2020. The title’s parenthesis carries the book’s argument: a city whose promise arrives already qualified by loss. Dressel approaches strangers directly, camera raised, and they meet his gaze knowing they are being photographed. That mutual awareness gives the pictures their charge; these are not stolen exposures but brief, negotiated encounters.

The photographs are rendered in hard black and white, a register suited to a metropolis where the dream of making it survives mostly as residue, and where most of the people in these pages remain outside it. Dressel’s gaze is unsentimental without being cold, and the sequencing builds a portrait of a city from the accumulated weight of individual faces.

Dressel’s biography shapes the work without explaining it away. Born in East Berlin in 1958, he studied set design briefly, served two years in East German prisons after a failed escape attempt, and moved west before settling in Los Angeles, where he built a career as a sound editor. Listening is his profession; looking is his preoccupation. The lineage he works in—classic street photography, pursued without legal clearance—is increasingly rare.

Hartmann Books publishes the book in a German-and-English edition of 176 pages with 107 illustrations, co-published with Gingko Press and designed by Benjamin Wohlbergs with the photographer, as a hardcover with foil-stamping at 24 × 31 cm. An essay by Matthias Harder and an interview between F. Scott Hess and Dressel accompany the photographs. The city comes into focus through Dressel’s years of walking, and for readers attuned to contemporary documentary practice, this first survey of the Los Angeles work is a considered addition.