Edge-Cities, Minus the Edge : Catherine Opie’s collection of photos at MOCA explores L.A.’s landscape of mini-malls and freeways, but where are her essential portraits?

Catherine Opie’s new black-and-white photographs of urban mini-malls around Los Angeles depict places where the city’s ethnic profile is in visible flux. No people are seen in the pictures, only shop signs spelled out in a jumble of languages--English, Spanish, Korean, Farsi, Chinese.

If the photographs, which are on view in a small Focus Series show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, are somewhat disappointing, it is not because of their surface differences from Opie’s more widely known work. In recent years the young L.A.-based artist has made her reputation with large color portraits of transvestites, transsexuals, sadomasochists and others among what used to be sneeringly called the demimonde. It is those sometimes startling pictures for which Opie most likely was granted the first Emerging Artist Award from MOCA and Citibank Private Bank, which is the reason for the current show. But none of those portraits is anywhere to be seen at the museum.

Instead, rather benign landscapes are. The seven new mini-mall photographs have been paired with 40 platinum prints from Opie’s 1994-95 series of pictures of area freeways. The absence of any portraits inevitably leaves you wondering about institutional nervousness.

It’s too bad. Within the modern megalopolis the mini-malls are like encapsulated edge-cities, while the portraits record socially marginalized communities. Conceptual connections between the two bodies of work are provocative.

Mini-malls are an L.A. phenomenon of the 1980s, when a sudden explosion of construction rapidly transformed the urban fabric. Like instant villages, they sprouted up on street corners all over town. Their suddenness and ubiquity became topics of heated discussion.

As a documentarian, Opie photographs the aftermath of the phenomenon. Her interest in recording socially revealing building types in formats that play on the subject matter is plainly indebted to the compelling work of Judy Fiskin, with whom she studied at CalArts in the late 1980s, and, by extension, to Edward Ruscha’s more deadpan L.A. photographs of the 1960s.

Opie’s mini-mall Iris prints are large--16 inches high and 41 inches long--their horizontality emphasizing both modern sprawl and the visual sense of scanning that comes from driving in a car. Invariably her mini-malls are at street corners, and they mostly seem to be in the central city: Koreatown, Sunset and Gower, 6th and Wilton.

The shops cover a pretty wide variety of services, too: fast food, hair salons, health clinics, traffic schools, branch banks.

Yet, it isn’t the diverse stores or signage that is most curious about these pictures. Instead, the photographs convey a pregnant sense of suspended but impending liveliness.

The shops are closed, no people are anywhere to be seen, no cars drive by. Streets are empty.

Sometimes a store sign is lit, mostly not.

The pictures appear to have been taken in early morning light. The skies are flat sheets of gray, with an occasional smudge of low cloudiness. Looking at them, you have the feeling that the artist had to hurry, that she was working within a brief window of opportunity between the breaking dawn and the restless end of urban slumber.

Opie’s portraits of mini-malls portray them in the moments before they come alive. If these vernacular buildings are indeed symbols of rapid urban transformation, she’s stopped the speeding clock.

The pictures are accomplished, but their appeal is mostly anthropological. Far more resonant are Opie’s earlier silver prints of L.A. freeways.

In these pictures the format is also emphatically horizontal but small: The lushly printed images are just 2 1/8 inches by 6 1/5 inches. Given the shape, looking at the swooping freeway ramps depicted is like seeing them reflected in the rearview mirror in your car.

The backward glance is revealing. From their inception L.A.’s imposing, sometimes spectacular freeways have been a reigning symbol of postwar California optimism. Opie’s documentary photographs record the passing of that futuristic dream: It’s not where we’re headed, it’s where we’ve been.

This poignant sense of passage is also stylistically fabricated, through the artist’s resuscitation of old-fashioned photographic Pictorialism. The blurred softness and visual tactility of that romantic style was originally meant to downplay the cold mechanical qualities of photography in favor of a more painterly--and thus ostensibly more artistic--look.

The heyday of Pictorialist photography precedes the building of the freeways, which coincide more closely with the dominance of the sleeker, crisper, harder-edged style of black-and-white picture-making called straight photography. Picturing symbols of forward-looking optimism in an old-fashioned style results in freeway images that feel oddly memorialized.

Once seen, they’ll change your freeway experience. Looking at the soft, silvery pictures of gigantic concrete pilings and soaring roadbeds is rather like looking at 19th century documentary photographs of the Holy Land or Egypt’s Valley of the Kings.

Like museums, which the great Indian scholar A.K. Coomaraswamy once described as places where we proudly display a way of life we have made impossible, Opie’s freeway photographs commemorate a frame of mind that has passed.

* Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., (213) 626-6222, through Feb. 8. Closed Mondays.