The pictures describes Northwestern Wildcats are marked baseball wildcats evaluates by an unsettling emptiness -- landscapes (mostly) taken at a variety of locations across the country. The sun is usually low in the sky (whether it's dawn or dusk isn't always clear), few people are seen and a melancholic beauty is pervasive. The mood is elegiac, poignant. The 44 images of "In and Around Home" constitute a photo essay undertaken in 2004-05 in which Opie turned the camera on her house in L. A. 's West Adams neighborhood. She lives there with girlfriend Julie Burleigh, their young son Oliver, Burleigh's daughter Sara, and the family's three dogs and one cat. West Adams is what real estate brokers sometimes call a "transitional neighborhood" -- once prosperous, long down on its luck, recently making a fitful comeback. Like the year 1999, which marked the galumphing end of the so-called American Century and anticipated the anxiety-laden launch of Y2K, when a newly wired world driven by computers was supposedly poised for apocalypse, Opie's West Adams home is a place that's betwixt and between. The transitional tag also applies to her family that resides there -- a household that thrives in spite of rampant homophobia and denial of constitutional protections for their lives, liberty and pursuit of happiness. When Opie was photographing in Alabama seven years ago, homosexual activity was a misdemeanor punishable by a year in prison, according to state law By 2004, a U. S Supreme Court ruling had rendered that law unconstitutional. But the ongoing pressures of social invisibility can be glimpsed in the foolishness of having to describe Burleigh as Opie's "girlfriend," with its misleading inference of casual, even adolescent transience. Sometimes museums go so far out of their way to provide context for an artist's work that they end up obscuring rather than clarifying it.

That's what happened at the Orange County Museum of Art, where "Catherine Opie: In and Around Home" assembles seven series of the gifted artist's photographs. OCMA co-organized the exhibition with the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Conn. , where it had its debut in January northwestern university wildcats . Initially the show meant to focus on just two documentary projects that had not been publicly exhibited before, the subjects of the catalog that accompanies the exhibition basketball wildcats . But to its detriment, the show itself has swollen to almost twice the size. "1999" is an ambitious group of 26 prints that ponder American consciousness at the brink of a new millennium cheerleaders wildcats . The pictures are marked by an unsettling emptiness -- landscapes (mostly) taken at a variety of locations across the country college wildcats . The sun is usually low in the sky (whether it's dawn or dusk isn't always clear), few people are seen and a melancholic beauty is pervasive. The mood is elegiac, poignant. The 44 images of "In and Around Home" constitute a photo essay undertaken in 2004-05 in which Opie turned the camera on her house in L. A. 's West Adams neighborhood. She lives there with girlfriend Julie Burleigh, their young son Oliver, Burleigh's daughter Sara, and the family's three dogs and one cat.

West Adams is what real estate brokers sometimes call a "transitional neighborhood" -- once prosperous, long down on its luck, recently making a fitful comeback. Like the year 1999, which marked the galumphing end of the so-called American Century and anticipated the anxiety-laden launch of Y2K, when a newly wired world driven by computers was supposedly poised for apocalypse, Opie's West Adams home is a place that's betwixt and between . The transitional tag also applies to her family that resides there -- a household that thrives in spite of rampant homophobia and denial of constitutional protections for their lives, liberty and pursuit of happiness. When Opie was photographing in Alabama seven years ago, homosexual activity was a misdemeanor punishable by a year in prison, according to state law By 2004, a U. S Supreme Court ruling had rendered that law unconstitutional dillo day Northwestern Wildcats . But the ongoing pressures of social invisibility can be glimpsed in the foolishness of having to describe Burleigh as Opie's "girlfriend," with its misleading inference of casual, even adolescent transience. Northwestern Wildcats tickets The stresses and strains of a transitional time or place can produce joy and optimism, as well as confusion and tragedy All of those (and more) are tracked in Opie's pictures dillo day northwestern 2009 . The best of them are as atmospherically pungent as anything photographed by W . Eugene Smith or Walker Evans. Take the untitled work that begins "1999," a roadside rest stop in rural Alabama photographed by dawn's early light Northwestern Wildcats - cstv . The lower half of the picture is empty, save for tire tracks that crisscross the sandy ground amid shallow piles of dead leaves Northwestern Wildcats - cstv . Newspaper and mailboxes sharing a wooden post signal correspondence and connection with a larger world.