Untitled #11

When Catherine Opie photographed this mini-mall in Silverlake, a Los Angeles neighborhood near downtown, its businesses reflected the bilingual nature of a community that included many Spanish-speaking residents of Mexican and Central American heritage. This is one of seventeen images that make up the series Mini-malls. The large format of both the film negative and the resulting digital print (made from scanning the negative) increases the legibility of details. Signs in a variety of languages underscore the ethnic diversity of Los Angeles's inhabitants and the challenges of immigrant assimilation. Inspired by the quality of expansiveness that permeates late-nineteenth-century landscape photographs, Catherine Opie began documenting contemporary urban landscapes with a 7 x 17-inch panoramic format camera.