Angels Point is a cliff’s edge in Elysian Park, the oldest park in Los Angeles. In 2017, I began photographing this wilderness overlooking the concrete sprawl of the city with a 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. ‘The road leading to Angels Point is lined with palm trees and parked cars. On the asphalt, broken glass, used condoms, and a deflated birthday balloon shimmer in the sun. Footprints snake out into the dry brush. All paths frequented, all paths alone. Old sycamores keep watch from above, etched with names of past lovers and lost phone numbers. Below is a vast sea of highways and houses. Above, glass towers peek through the cloud of smog. Angels Point stands at the edge of the new and the forgotten. A place to hide, to explore, with no commitments, no judgments.’ - Adam Ianniello 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. The project opens with a chance encounter with a man named Angel, 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 my own experiences of walking through Angels Point, stopping to photograph along the way, as I was learning how to use the view camera. The park’s environment afforded me the anonymity to wander with a tripod without feeling out of place. The meditative nature of constructing these images at this slow pace allowed the narrative of the project to be guided by nature rather than by the park’s passing visitors. Angels Point will be published as a monograph by GOST books in February 2023. https://gostbooks.com/angels-point/ Adam Ianniello (b. 1987) is an American landscape photographer currently based in Los Angeles, California. His photographs have been featured in various publications such as American Chordata, C4 Journal, Def Greif and Vogue as well as widely exhibited, most recently in Mark Steinmetz and Irina Rozovsky’s group show ‘When in Athens’. In 2020, he co-founded the imprint Smog Press. Ianniello was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, and studied art history and photography at Baruch College and the School of Visual Arts.