“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."

 — From the Introduction by John Bailey

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.