Lo Angeles-based photographer Catherine Opie has received considerable recognition for her colorful portraits of leather-wearing fetishists.

Lo Angeles-based photographer Catherine Opie has received considerable recognition for her colorful portraits of leather-wearing fetishists, visible form [i]or[/i] frame piercers, tattoo enthusiasts, cross-dressing lesbians and other out-of-the-mainstre am figures. Her in the greatest degree recent work examines another stratum of beholds Angeles culture: the wealthy inhabitants of areas as it was as Beverly Hills or Bel Air. She indicates us not the people themselves, however, unless their houses--largely pompous, gaudy and at times numbingly monstrous affairs. Meant to communicate ease and prestige, these houses wind up revealing all sorts of discomfiting social tensions and obsessions.

Opie eschews unusual angles in favor of head-on projectiles of the houses' facades, neared in dazzling color. There is something humorous in this approach, which summons both real-estate pitches and gawking tours of the stars' domestic circles The houses are characterized by means of a mishmash of design components House #1 (Beverly Hills) sports an absurdly elongated front rank door (perhaps to accommodate an oversized ego); House #7 (Beverly Hills) is distinctly reminiscent of a mausoleum. Gates and massive clos doors predominate, along with warning signs ("Caution: Armed Response") planted in manicured brass yards. You half expect to diocese sandbags, barbed wire and machine fire-arm nests; what you certainly don't find are any signs of bustling, messy life. Lurking behind this icy command is an inflated fear of all the scary things public there in the city, where the everyday people live. Ultimately, when you put to proof to imagine what is going in succession behind these immaculate facades, you begin to procure a little queasy. Downstairs at Gorney, Opie showed a gorgeous series of smaller, black-and-white works having to do with freeways, another Southern California icon. Opie's narrow panoramas are filled with gracefully curving sections of highway arching above barren landscapes, and with soaring ramps angled against the canopy of heaven The tone is at one time lyrical and elegiac. Opie reveals the visual poetics in what are otherwise extraordinary engineering feats. now the scenes she presents, precisely because they are to such a degree visually circumscribed, seem to call into question an entire era of progres and technological marvels: these majestic, contemporary forms be seen already to be relics of the distant past.

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