Description

Adam Ianniello – Angels Point
Publisher: GOST Books, 2023
Hardcover, 88 pages, English
Size: 29x24cm
New in seal

Angels Point is a cliff’s edge in Elysian Park, the oldest park in Los Angeles. In 2017, Adam Ianniello began photographing this wilderness overlooking the concrete sprawl of the city with his large-format camera. The resulting black and white photographs, taken over a period of three years, capture the lesser-seen sublime in the midst of one of America’s largest cities.

Elysian Park was founded in 1866. Previous uses of the land include a Jewish cemetery, a rock quarry, and the Chavez Ravine, a rural Mexican-American neighbourhood demolished and buried under Dodger Stadium which sits below Angels Point. The histories of the land pervade book—the photographs show the traces and artifacts of those who have passed through. The large-format medium references the landscape photography of the past whilst the images themselves bear witness to contemporary life.

The book opens with a chance encounter with a man named Angel and is then sequenced to follow his imagined path through the park, lingering on hideaways, forgotten objects and strangers before exiting the park at dusk. This echoes Ianniello’s own experiences of walking through Angels Point, stopping to photograph along the way, as he learnt how to use the view camera. The park’s environment afforded him the anonymity to wander with a tripod without feeling out of place. Turning on its head the current era of instant image production, the meditative nature of constructing the images at this slow pace allowed the narrative of the book to be guided by nature rather than by the park’s passing visitors.