Lost Angeles

Michael Dressel’s street photography relies on his long practiced ability to anticipate events that are about to happen and the readiness to capture these moments. In Lost Angeles, the viewer is invited to view some of Dressel’s most poignant portraits and to be transported to that moment and place. Dressel professes to loving Los Angeles “warts and all” and is clearly comfortable moving through the city’s streets, angling for those “magical” moments and showing us things that most would rather look away from. Mr. Dressel was born in East Berlin and spent 2 years in a Stasi prison after being captured while climbing the Berlin wall. He moved from Berlin to Los Angeles in 1986 and has spent the past 35 years taking photos while making a living as a movie sound editor. Lost Angeles features an interview with F. Scott Hess, artist and associate professor at Laguna college of Art along with an afterword by Matthias Harder, the director of the Helmut Newton Foundation, Berlin. The black & white photographs collected for Lost Angeles were taken between 2014 – 2020.

“I do believe in magic. The magic that happens when I am pointing a camera at life and freeze a few hundredths of a second into an image. Afterwards that image turns into this thing that communicates what I think and feel about the world This magic allows me to photograph myself into the world.” – Michael Dressel