Janna Ireland's photograph Hancock Park, House 1, #5 takes an oblique look at a residential interior. From the bottom right, it traces the sinuous line of a spiral staircase climbing skyward. Toward the upper edge of the image, the line darts to the right, then to the left, forming a luminous wedge. Light washes across the surfaces of the stairwell, whose delicately proportioned nosing, scalloped carriage, and twisted spindles speak of a time past. What first appears to be a window gives onto a private universe visible through the forged iron balusters. A corridor crossing the landing above reveals a brightly lit space bounded by a wall hung with framed images that are just out of Ireland's focal range. One is left wondering what memories or stories are embedded in those assorted frames.Hancock Park, House 1, #5 belongs to a series of photographs Ireland began to produce in 2016. Inspired by "stories about people who have been historically cast aside, ignored, or actively harmed by those in power,"1 this body of work offers a timely meditation on native Angeleno architect Paul Revere Williams (1894-1980). Entitled There is Only One Paul R. Williams, the series brings to light the under-esteemed legacy of America's most prolific Black architect. Stripped of color and concentrated on interior views, the images are at once documentary and conjectural, recording the spatial lyricism Williams unfurled behind facades cast in a variety of styles. Ireland's photographs capture his residential designs in the wake of demolition or disfiguring alterations, thereby becoming a contemporary archive of what remains. They effectively fill the voids left by historians and theorists who ignored Williams's unparalleled trajectory through a culture and a profession still troubled by racial, social, and gender discrimination.
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