In the mid-1970s Bevan Davies turned an 8×10-inch view camera on the apartment houses of Los Angeles, working on weekend mornings when the light was low and the streets were quiet. He set the film plane parallel to each facade, a discipline that refuses the drama of perspective and asks the viewer to read the buildings as flat, deliberate surfaces. What emerges is not a survey of individual landmarks but a study of type: the decorative and the utilitarian pressed into the same frame, shadows doing the work of punctuation.

Davies, born in 1941 and educated at the University of Chicago, came to maturity as an artist in the 1970s, and the photographs gathered here belong to that moment. The work was shown early and widely, at Sonnabend Gallery in New York, the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, and it entered the permanent collections of the Getty Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. That institutional record gives the book a context beyond nostalgia: it is a document of a practice that was being taken seriously while it was still new.

Nazraeli Press published Los Angeles, 1976 in 2014 as a slipcased hardcover of 48 pages, with 32 duotone plates, in a limited edition of 350 numbered and signed copies.

For a collector, the interest lies in several things at once: the period, the method, and the fact that this is the form in which a coherent body of 1970s work became available as a book. Davies photographed Los Angeles architecture at a time when the city was, in the publisher’s phrase, uniquely fertile ground for artists, and his images of its residential stock sit close to the concerns that would occupy later photographers of the built environment. The book is neither a retrospective nor a survey; it is a tightly framed encounter with a specific place and year, produced with the care that such a narrow focus deserves.