The Los Angeles Architecture and Portrait pictures, mostly fragmented views made at night and during dusk, don’t feign to be documents. Their power resides in Welling’s ability to distill the building’s details into a symbolic language that conveys the creepy alienation of American Life in the mid.1970s, as well as the anxiety, foreboding, and disillusionment associated with this period.
The small-format prints might at first glance appear to be pedestrian snapshots, but on closer inspection their studied points of view signal more ordered.
