Light at the Wrong Angle

Rachel Lynch worked in the aesthetic vocabulary of LA’s underside—motels, gas stations, liquor stores, spaces designed for something temporary that ended up being very permanent. The Milshire Motel was one of her locations: a squat roadside fixture with the quality of a place that exists in a perpetual late afternoon, light coming through blinds at the wrong angle. In her photographs, that setting produces something between glamour and threat, all beautiful surface and uncomfortable subtext. The gun and the girl and the ugly-pretty backdrop became a recognizable look, and she made it her own.