Art Review

Fallen Angelenos: Karin Apollonia Mueller’s photographs at Stephen Cohen Gallery paint a picture of Southern California as a supremely unnatural landscape, in which lost souls wander without aim, purpose or pleasure. Like ghosts who haunt the world rather than inhabit its flesh-and-blood reality, the people in these prints intensify the deathly stillness put forth by their overexposed skies and seemingly endless expanses of concrete ditches, bridges and freeways.

Titled “Angels in Fall,” Mueller’s strong-willed show aims to expose the reality of modern urban alienation. With relentless regularity, viewers are served up images of litter-strewn alleys, monstrously scaled landfills and smog-choked skies, whose midday glare causes you to squint.

Generic housing developments under construction are a favorite subject of the German-born, L.A.-based photographer, as are the nether regions around freeway entrances and exits, where the inhuman scale of the man-made structures dwarfs pedestrians. In many images, a lone homeless person appears, making his forlorn way well off the beaten path.

As a group, Mueller’s pictures argue that L.A. is a place bereft of happiness and devoid of human interaction--an alien wasteland filled with people leading lives of quiet desperation and others too clueless to even know they’re miserable.

Spectacular appearances are religiously avoided, all the better to play up a grim sense of isolation. Colors are consistently washed out. Compositions are abruptly cut off, and the camera is often aimed downward from a position of disembodied detachment that does double duty as the moral high ground.

Mueller’s photographs continue a postwar tradition of European immigrants who have moved to Southern California and found it to be a world completely unlike the one they left behind. Theodor Adorno is probably the most famous social critic who made a name for himself by condemning L.A. for not measuring up to his sentimental memories of the Old World.

Mueller’s photographs are faint, fourth-generation echoes of the Marxist’s turgid social analyses. Rather than developing new terms for the new world, her images (like Adorno’s essays) rely on cliches that leave too much out of the picture to get a grip on the slippery reality of Los Angeles.

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* Stephen Cohen Gallery, 7358 Beverly Blvd., (213) 937-5525, through June 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays.