After/Image: Los Angeles Outside the Frame

by Lynell George (Photographer)

Los Angeles lives largest in the world’s imagination. It can be a projection, a solution, a temporary fix, a long-term goal. For Lynell George―and millions of others―it’s simply home. After/ Los Angeles Outside the Frame by Lynell George is the result of this award-winning journalist’s years of contemplating and writing about the arts, culture, and social issues of Los Angeles, always with an emphasis on place and the identity of the people who live in―or leave―L.A. As a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly, Lynell George explored place after place that makes the city tick, met person after person, and encountered the cumulative heart of the city. After/Image is her collection of essays, evocative photographs, profiles, and reportage focused on Los Angeles beneath-the-surface―both the past and the here-and-now. In its pages, Lynell George explores a set of questions about her native After decades of wholesale rethinking, what distinguishing features of the city remain deeply rooted? What rituals, details, passed-on lifestyles persist outside the edges of the frame―beyond the projected idea of Los Angeles? What are the lasting memories, the essential “afterimages” upon which we reflect? What do its people carry around in their own imagination and their hearts? How does the rest of the country look at L.A.―and why? Lynell George’s contemplations about Los Angeles are deeply in sync with the Angel City Press no one book can capture the scope of the city―a place with many stories to tell. And yet, with After/ Los Angeles Outside the Frame, Lynell George proves every mantra can be re-examined. Lynell George is a journalist and essayist. After/ Los Angeles Outside the Frame is her first book of essays and photography, exploring the city where she grew up. She is also the author of No Crystal African Americans in the City of Angels, a collection of features and essays drawn from her reportage. As a staff writer for both the Los Angeles Times and L.A. Weekly, she focused on social issues, human behavior, and identity politics, as well as visual arts, music, and literature. She taught journalism at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, in 2013 was named a USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellow, and in 2017 received the Huntington Library’s Alan Jutzi Fellowship for her studies of California writer Octavia E. Butler. Her writings have appeared in several essay collections. A contributing arts-and-culture columnist for KCET|Artbound, her commentary has also been featured in numerous news and feature outlets including A Journal of California, Smithsonian, Zócalo Public Square, Los Angeles Review of Books, Vibe, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, Essence, Black Clock, and Ms. Her liner notes for Otis Redding's Live At The Whisky A Go The Complete Recordings won a 2017 GRAMMY.

Genres: Nonfiction

175 pages, Hardcover

Published March 3, 2018

About the author

Lynell George is a Los Angeles-based writer. A former staff writer for both the Los Angeles Times and L.A. Weekly, she focused on social issues, human behavior, as well as visual arts, music, and literature. She is the author of three books of nonfiction: The Hugo Award-finalist, "A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler," "After/Image: Los Angeles Outside the Frame, and "No Crystal Stair: African Americans in the City of Angels," a collection of features and essays drawn from her reportage. In 2017 received the Huntington Library’s Alan Jutzi Fellowship for her studies of California writer Octavia E. Butler and won a GRAMMY for "Otis Redding Live At The Whisky A Go Go: The Complete Recordings" in the Best Album Notes category. In 2020 she was awarded a Distinguished Journalist award by Society of Professional Journalists/L.A.

Reviews

[Susan Eubank · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here are the questions discussed at the Reading the Western Landscape Book Club at the Arboretum Library of the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden on February 20, 2019:

• How does this book confirm or shift your view of the LA and/or the west?
• Who was your favorite person in the book? Why?
• What is the overarching theme of this book?
• What did the pictures do for the book?
• What did you like best about this book/least?
• Tell us about a passage that resonated for you as the flavor of your LA too?
• What is unique about the author’s experience?
• Any ambiguities we need to clear up?
• If you were the author or editor what is one thing you might change about the book?

Icebreaker: How long have you lived in the Los Angeles area? What change did you most revolt against?

[Denise Ervin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I know that it's not possible, but I wish for everyone to have the insight of Lynell George. If we could all know our homes as intimately as she does, perhaps we would be as willing to interrogate them with an inquisitive mind and not just a sense of nostalgia. What this book has taught me, what I will seek to do in my writing now, is to treat my setting as a character. My chosen setting is the land of my birth, Detroit, and I know how important it is for Detroit natives to craft Detroit narratives. The news will tell about our "rebirth" or "renaissance," a tale similar to the ones often told about George's hometown of Los Angeles, but I will tell what Detroit has always been and how it has changed. What can be reborn without dying first?

[David Allen · Rating 2 out of 5]

This collection of essays, reportage, memoir and photographs never cohered for me. Whoever wrote the back cover and inside flap seemed to struggle as well to sum up what the book was about. George has thought a lot about L.A., but possibly too much; she seems offended that over four or five decades, L.A.'s built environment has changed and newcomers want to write their own stories. Also, there must be an average of one copy-editing mistake per page.

[Virginia Walter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Insightful essays and a sprinkling of photos by a Los Angeles native explore the places that have made this city meaningful to her. She also mourns those that have been lost to gentrification and rampant development.