Angel City West: Volume One (signed)
Regular price £160.00 Save Liquid error (snippets/product-template line 124): Computation results in '-Infinity'%I entered the Yale School of Art straight from college and left after my first semester. I was 21. I was restless, curious about the America that lay beyond New England, and had a strong interest in the movie industry; I also had heard that Garry Winogrand was somewhere in Los Angeles so in the summer of 1983 I headed west.” – Mark Steinmetz, from the Preface
Angel City West offers a touching, highly personal look at Los Angeles through the eyes of Mark Steinmetz as a young artist straight out of school. In his preface to the work, Steinmetz describes living in a studio apartment in the Miracle Mile district, complete with a futon surrounded by a dozen roach motels and a makeshift darkroom set up in a tiny nook off of the bathroom. It didn’t take long before he ran into Garry Winogrand, for whom he became a kind of unofficial chauffeur, enabling Winogrand to photograph through the car window while Steinmetz navigated the streets of his new home town.
Viewed together in book form, the 58 photographs presented in Angel City West document Steinmetz finding his own voice as an artist. In light of the later projects for which he has become so well known, this early series of street photographs, informal portraits and landscapes foreshadows the sometimes humorous, oftentimes sad, and always poignant mood that runs through Mark Steinmetz’s work.
Edition of 350 signed and numbered copies. This is an unnumbered Artists Proof (still signed as usual).
Book in as new condition, some possible light indentations to the slipcase (common).
Angel City West: Volume Two (signed)
Regular price £160.00 Save Liquid error (snippets/product-template line 124): Computation results in '-Infinity'%“Mark Steinmetz makes photographs of ordinary people in the ordinary landscapes they inhabit. His frames document those fluid moments of real, lived life, moments not just grabbled or stolen, but ones where he says, ‘It’s important to take an internal pause.’ An element of the seeming offhand magic in his photographs is how his sense of this “internal pause,” of a near cinematic freeze frame, only enhances his images’ apparent spontaneity. The best art often hides its technique . . . Steinmetz is, in fact, is a “street” photographer: a 21st century embodiment of the 19th century flâneur, a man in the world, sensitive to ephemeral moments as photographic capsules of our larger lives. This will come as no surprise to anyone who knows Steinmetz’s artistic history as a mentee of Garry Winogrand.
You don’t have to be a creature of the urban streetscapes that Steinmetz so closely observes in this book in order to “get” his work. From his books of photographs of Greater Atlanta, to the small world of a children’s baseball diamond in The Players, Mark Steinmetz’s camera focuses closely on these ordinary, even banal, moments of people’s daily lives, even when in some images, the people themselves are absent at the instant of the camera exposure. Like the more formal compositions of Cartier-Bresson, Steinmetz’s photographs capture their own “decisive moment,” less stylized for sure, but often more animated: simply the images of an “American” photographer.” — From the Introduction by John Bailey
Edition of 350 signed and numbered copies.Angel City West: Volume Three (signed)
Regular price £160.00 Save Liquid error (snippets/product-template line 124): Computation results in '-Infinity'%“I am now the same age that Garry Winogrand had been when I knew him – 56. I was just 22 then and now wonder why he had be willing to spend some time with someone so young. I must have come across as OK and probably mentioned some of the right names: Friedlander, Wessel, Zulpo-Dane. Once he called me up (the first time was startling to me as he must have looked up my name in the phone book) to see what I was up to the next day. I said, “If it’s sunny, I’m going to photograph; if it’s rainy, I’m going to print.” “Likewise,” he said. Maybe in some ways we were similar.
One day I asked Garry to go with me to photograph at the LA Zoo and he agreed. We had a full day and shot until the light faded. As we were nearing the exit, Garry spotted Bernadette Peters, the famous movie and Broadway actress, who was visiting the zoo with her boyfriend. Garry photographed her before on the set of John Huston’s movie, Annie. She and her boyfriend were dressed in identical jeans and jackets. Strikingly, they both had the same drooping, poodle-like hairstyle. Surprised, she threw her head back and shrieked with delight when Garry swooped in to take their picture. Out in the parking lot he sank into the passenger seat and said, “Boy, you don’t know how tired you are till you sit down.”
In February of 1984, I called him up to say I had decided to leave town and move back east. His voice on the other end of the phone sounded terrible, very weak. I had no idea what was going on with him – it was shocking. He wished me “the best of luck.” The following month, a couple weeks before my 23rd birthday, I was at my parents’ house in Hartford and my mother brought me the New York Times. Without saying a word, she pointed to Garry’s obituary. During the time we spent together, there had been a cancer growing inside of him but he didn’t know it. Garry was always looking outward, beyond himself.
We are pleased to announce the publication of Volume 3 in Mark Steinmetz’s trilogy Angel City West. Building upon the narrative he began with Volumes 1 & 2, Steinmetz presents 54 previously unpublished photographs made during his stay in Los Angeles in 1981–84.
Edition of 350 signed and numbered copies.
Book in as new condition, some possible light indentations to the slipcase (common).