Between 1981 and 1984, Mark Steinmetz lived in Los Angeles and photographed there. Angel City West: Volume Two gathers fifty-one of those photographs, none of them published before this book, made when the city’s streets, parking lots, and front yards served as his working ground. Steinmetz, a student of Garry Winogrand, works in the street-photography tradition: he watches ordinary people in ordinary landscapes, waiting for the moment when a passing gesture or a held pause opens into something larger. The pictures in this volume belong to that long apprenticeship in looking.
This is the second part of a trilogy, following the first Angel City West volume and preceding a third, and it extends a narrative begun earlier rather than standing alone as a survey. What distinguishes the sequence is its patience. Steinmetz’s frames are not snatched so much as held: the pause inside the exposure, the near-cinematic freeze, gives the images a composure that their casual subjects would seem to resist. The result is a body of work about daily life in a specific place and decade, made by a photographer who would go on to become one of the more quietly influential American photographers of his generation.
John Bailey, the cinematographer and a Los Angeles native, contributes the introduction. His perspective matters here: he writes about Steinmetz’s photographs from inside another medium, film, and from inside the city itself. That pairing of a photographer’s still frames with a filmmaker’s eye for movement and place gives the book a productive tension, one that suits a project set in a city built as much by movies as by anything else.
Nazraeli Press published the volume as a slipcased hardcover of sixty-four pages, with the plates printed in duotone. The book is large, and the production values are those the press has long brought to its photography titles. For collectors of Steinmetz’s work, or of the West Coast street photography of the early 1980s, this volume is a substantive addition: not an overview but a chapter in a sustained project, with an essay that frames the pictures in terms of both cinema and the city that produced them.
