Catherine Opie enunciates the intentions and ideas behind her current body of 2012-2013 works with the first two images the viewer encounters—one a portrait, the other an abstracted landscape that could loosely be described as meditative.

Lawrence (the conceptual artist, Lawrence Weiner), shining bald pate and frosty beard, open white-collared black shirt eliding seamlessly into the black backdrop, holding a cigarette, in slightly sheepish three-quarter view, receives our gaze with seeming resignation. Alongside it, what from the gallery doors might resemble a cluster of stars, a dazzle of light bounces off snowflakes falling on a darkened field, a stand of snow-dusted trees just barely limned in the middle ground. Light out of darkness.

Opie’s work implicitly addresses the cultural criteria for identification and identity as a function of place and, also, time. She hasn’t decontextualized her subjects here, so much as circumscribed their temporal actuality using disparate photographic means—in the portraits, closing in tightly on her subjects, isolating them in shadow and a dark surround; in the landscapes, opening the aperture and slowing or lengthening the exposure to sustain the moment. A deliberate ambiguity defines these blurred images. Our criteria for identification (or measure of geological and cosmic time) are called into question. Does the crest of a mountain ridge in one landscape (all of them untitled) loom any more prominently than a black tree dominating the foreground in another? The viewer’s notions of distance and proximity are inherently challenged.

Similarly, in the portraits, the emphasis on the temporal translates to gesture and attitude. In one of her largest photographs, Kate and Laura (the Mulleavy sisters, designers of the Rodarte fashion line), Laura, in long, ruffled white silk dress, kneels with a hand raised to Kate’s ear, as if whispering. Kate (black-clad) is seated, feet firmly planted, intently eyeing an embroidery circle through which she draws red thread seemingly into a red bloodstain. Portraits and landscapes alike connote realities both boldly stated and secretly whispered.

Another large portrait—Idexa (Stern, the tattoo artist)—presents an elaborately tattooed body frontally to the camera, but with head turned at an angle, eyes just slightly squinting: “Do I know you?” The photographs probe the notion of visual acquisition. We have the moment, and everything else stands outside it.

Opie draws on High Renaissance and Baroque conventions, not without an element of subversion, but her portraits are clearly ideations of her subjects. Her reverse three-quarter portrait of Jonathan (Franzen) is almost a literal instance of this—the spectacled silhouette just recognizable in shadow, with light catching the silvery highlights of his graying hair but falling principally on the book in his lap—Tolstoy’s War and Peace. (As serious as these portraits are, they are not without humor.)

To identify, specifically to name, is to fix in time. At their most transfixing, Opie’s photographs are about this imprint. An idealizing impulse manifests somewhere in the bleed from the conscious into the unconscious. But the magic inheres in plain view—although that view may be through murky depths.