Angels Point: Interview with Adam Ianniello
What is the backstory of Angels Point?
Angels Point is a cliff’s edge that overlooks the east side of Los Angeles. It is located in Elysian Park, the oldest park in Los Angeles. The earliest written records describe a landscape of brushy hills and ravines, lush with sage, chaparral, and sprawling walnut and oak trees. The Tongva people, indigenous to California, would use the sage for ritual and medicine. From the 1700s on, as the colonists arrived, the hills became barren. Native trees were cut down for homes and firewood, and the brush and sage were eroded away by pasture and land development. The mountains themselves were ripped apart by quarrying. The place had become almost worthless.
In the late 1800s, a philosophical return to nature movement called transcendentalism took hold in the west. Partly inspired by the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, and John Muir, Americans started to re-evaluate conservation and a return to the wilderness. First Yosemite and Central Park and not soon after in 1886, LA Mayor Henry Hazard designated Elysian Park as the first public nature park in Los Angeles. In a six-year timeframe, over 150,000 trees were planted, and trails and cliff points were etched for those who wished to visit to experience the Los Angeles Sublime. A place where everyone could enjoy.
The landscape here, however, continues to exist in a paradox. Due to the state-sponsored destruction and erasure of the Chavez Ravine in the 1950s. The Chavez Ravine, made up of three Mexican-American neighborhoods that existed alongside Elysian Park, was demolished for the construction of Dodgers Stadium. Being part Latino and raised in Brooklyn where the Dodgers originated, I felt a deep historical solidarity with those who were banished, lost everything, and lied to by the government. Remnants of the old neighborhoods can still be found in the brush and I could feel the weight of this event on the land.
I first visited Angels Point back in 2017, a year after I moved from New York. I felt that this landscape had a strange spirit, with many secrets to uncover and histories to unfold. I decided to set forth to photograph the park in a topographic narrative. It was an Eden for me, a sanctuary of wilderness to explore for three years.
What camera gear/editing setup did you use for Angels Point?
I primarily used a 4x5 view camera for the project (Chamonix 45F-2) along with Kodak Tri-x 320 sheet film. I actually learned how to use the camera through the making of this project. The park was a training ground, I could wander for hours, meditate on the land and concentrate on constructing a particular image without any interruptions.
The editing of the book was assisted with invaluable help from GOST director Stuart Smith. We paired down a much more portrait-heavy series to a singular intimate world, where a chance encounter with a wanderer serendipitously named Angel would then follow exploration of the park until the evening led to the road out of Angels Point. I liken the sequence to John Gossage’s ‘The Pond’ but with chance encounters / symbolic characters, interacting in the land along the way.
How do you achieve the look of your photographs in Angels point and could you take us through the process?
I think when I was starting this project I was living vicariously through the work of others that inspired me and aligned with my sensibilities. A few influential projects which were in the back of my head while making Angels Point: Robert Adams’s ‘Los Angeles Spring’, Anthony Hernandez's ‘Waiting, Sitting, Fishing, and some Automobiles’, Vanessa Winship’s ‘She Dances on Jackson’ and Lewis Baltz ‘Candlestick Point’.
However, I was most interested in the late work of Eugéne Atget, when he was close to the end of his life, exploring the ruins of Parc de Sceaux. The light depicted in that work is both haunting and transcendent, the compositions, are multilayered and made whole by nature. I was inspired aesthetically by those pictures to visit Angels Point in the early morning hours, during the winter and spring months, when Los Angeles has a dense marine layer and mist being slowly burned off by the sun. I didn't want this project to only exist in the harsh direct sunlight, which pervades so much work made here in Los Angeles.
The process of making photographs in the park felt similar to climbing an M.C Escher staircase, as I would wander for hours on off-beaten paths, without any clear direction. It was when I became lost in the world of Angels Point losing track of time, was when I was finally making the pictures I needed for the book.
Could you tell us the backstory of some of the photographs in Angels Point?
One photograph which encapsulates the process of making this book was ‘Lone Man Walking’ 2019. The Frogtown trail in the image weaves below the cliffs of Angels Point like a snake working its way along the brush. Its path was only wide enough for one person at a time. On an early overcast morning, I set up my view camera high above the trail waiting for someone to enter the frame at the right spot and complete the composition. I think I spent a few hours waiting, to the point where I was ready to give up and started to pack my belongings, lo and behold a lone man appeared! It’s moments like this that test your odds with the photography gods, you pray and wait and almost give up, and then they deliver. It was the only image I made that day.
The only portrait included in the book is of Angel, a man I met early on photographing in the park. He was once a radio announcer in Mexico and had these thick mutton chop sideburns like Wolverine. He was kindhearted and talkative and I could tell had a deep soul. When I took his portrait he asked if he could read my palm, after looking at the ridges in my hand for a moment, he said “I was slow to make decisions”. We decided to meet up again a week later at the same spot along a cliff, beneath some trees. It was late afternoon and I decided I wanted a close portrait of his face using a 210mm lens. Angel was staring straight into the sun, I asked for him to hold up his hand to shadow his eyes. I took only one frame, and it was the only one I needed. I still think about how much this book is about him, the guardian of Angels Point.
On January 1st, 2020, I decided to celebrate the new year as one does by venturing into the park to document the year's first sunset. The clouds in the sky formed an opaque ceiling above the park, and I quickly climbed a hill to get to this vantage point during dusk. This photograph became an omen for me, life before the pandemic, the abrupt closure of the park just a few months later, and the eventual end to this body of work.
What advice do you have for aspiring photographers who want to make a book?
Ask yourself, why a book? Can the project be resolved through an exhibition or even a self-published zine? I spent 13 years wanting to make a monograph. I maybe made six projects in that timeframe that were each scrapped or led away because I could not find a publisher willing to work with me. Looking back, I just wasn't there yet. I was still growing, and each time a door closed, a wound healed and a new direction came. If you feel that you're destined to make a book with a publisher then be prepared to suffer a great deal and it's going to take a great deal of time. Things are easier to keep perfect in the mind and releasing a book is like giving birth to a living thing. You're going to have to fight for your work, concede when it's necessary and collaborate when you hit a wall.
The best advice I can give is the practical kind. Learn Indesign, it will help you mock up a sequence that you can send around to friends for input and then prospective publishers. Find outside ways to invest in the project and cover publishing and travel costs, not everyone can fund their work through grants and contests.
Paste images of your work in other photobooks you love, it will help you see what size and format the book should be. Understand that the best photobooks are unresolved, not dense in size, and simply designed. Use the photobook medium to your advantage as a storyteller and realize that you are constructing a world, not just a sequence. Remember that you are breathing your consciousness into a bound printed object, it will outlast you.
