Photo: Noé Montes

Lynell George is an LA-based journalist and essayist. She has had a long career in LA journalism as a staff writer for both The Los Angeles Times and L.A. Weekly—focusing on social issues, human behavior, and identity politics as well as visual arts, music, and literature. Her writings have appeared in several essay collections. She has taught journalism at Loyola Marymount University, and is also a Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities Fellow and a USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellow (2013), and in 2017 received the Huntington Library’s Alan Jutzi Fellowship for her studies of California writer Octavia E. Butler. She is the author of No Crystal Stair: African Americans in the City of Angels (Verso/Doubleday), a collection of features and essays drawn from her reporting. A contributing arts-and-culture columnist for KCET’s Artbound, her commentary has also been featured in numerous news and feature outlets including Boom: 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 Live at the Whisky a Go Go won a 2017 GRAMMY.

After/Image: Los Angeles Outside the Frame

Bookcover for After/Image: palm trees, dark cloudy sky, facade of stucco arched building

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/Image: Los Angeles Outside the Frame 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—LA. 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 city: 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? (Angel City Press)