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26 M Ay – 23 JUNE

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Karin Apollonia Müller’s photographs nearly always
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seem on the edge of a quiet calamity. She stands
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back with her camera as the cityscape unravels in this
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series of car crashes, landslides and fires in and around
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Los Angeles. Much of the work has the relentless
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academic cool of the Bechers, but the catalogued
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subjects aren’t the ramshackle factories of abandoned

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industry. And even though they aren’t staged, her
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composition at its best echoes the strange beauty in
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the cinematographic scenes of Jeff Wall.
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Writers and filmmakers love to destroy Los Angeles; it’s been drowned, burned, H-bombed and buried in sand.
As Joan Didion wrote in 1968, ‘Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse.’ The far less grandiose
disasters in Müller’s work sit between flashes of the local broadcast news or the inconvenience most of us curse while stuck
in traffic, no matter how bloody their aftermath. These disasters create another avenue for LA to play itself. The capital of
media culture becomes an urban space for Müller, who in documenting its breakdown attempts to close the distance that the
media creates, using photography as a point of entry.
Müller photographs these disasters both after they’ve completed and while still in process. In the first, the disaster takes
a few moments to register. After circling the stillness of a landscape bathed in white hazy light, the eye falls on the crumpled
houses and overturned cars. Once the central subject of the photo asserts itself, the realisation is chilling. In Broadway (all
works 2007), the static landscape becomes punctured by a car lying casually on its side in the centre of the street, the grey
stone Hall of Justice sitting heavily in Beaux-Arts civic grandeur just behind it.
When the disaster looms ominously, still present, seething and alive, the contained and quiet energy takes on the
colours of real dread. In Griffith Park Boulevard I the cloud shifts from burnt sienna to charcoal, the blue sky peeking behind
looking like a spreading bruise.
Both styles are marked by a kind of placidity, an academic distance from the object of study. In Griffith Park Boulevard
I, however, the billowing cloud and the helicopter – like a thrashing insect crawling across its grandeur – close the distance
with frightening intimacy. The disaster on TV becomes the disaster in your front yard. Though still mediated, it feels like the
media can no longer hold its distance, as if it too will be swallowed by the smoke. The tumbling houses and car wrecks seem
almost an inevitability of landscape, carefully documented by a scientist. Though handled with the same care as the others,
in Griffith Park Boulevard I and II the distance disappears, and the photographer standing back on the edge threatens to be
swallowed into the fiery heart of the beautifully hellish clouds. Though Müller’s camera haunts the edges of disasters, she
realises her most beautiful work when she nearly falls in. Andrew Berardini
127 Artreview
NEW Sept_REVIEWS.indd 13 7/8/07 15:48:29
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