“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.