William Eggleston’s photographs of Graceland—a portrait of Elvis through his artifacts—were an inspiration for the Taylor portfolio, and the pictures share a feeling of haunted stillness. They add up to a life, however glamorous, that has evaporated. Taylor died unexpectedly during Opie’s project. “It became this last document,” Opie said, “so my editing had to carry a certain kind of reverence: This is it. This is the sum.”

Scrolling through images on her computer, Opie said, “Same thing happened with 9/11.” By chance, she had been photographing Wall Street a few weeks before the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Suddenly, the pictures—understated black-and-white images of the labyrinth of the financial district, without a human being or a moving vehicle in sight—had a different meaning. Opie pulled up a photograph in which the Twin Towers are visible in the background. “They look like ghost buildings,” she said.

“Self-Portrait/Pervert,” 1994.

She flipped to an image of the Cocoa Exchange Building, with its Flatiron-like curve, flanked by parked vehicles on Pearl and Beaver Streets. “This could very easily be a Berenice Abbott photograph—except for the cars,” Opie said, and smiled. “The history of photography is full of those signifiers. And I love that kind of shit.” There is almost no sky in any of the pictures; Opie shot them all from the viewpoint of a pedestrian looking forward. “New York is often photographed vertically, so to create this kind of Western landscape of the city, through the horizontal panorama, is another way of debunking an icon.”

Opie’s drive to memorialize the past—or the present as it slips into history—is offset by a desire to explode convention: she is a nostalgic renegade. (Even her speech is a mixture of the rebellious and the homey. She has the slightly lazy sound of a pot-smoking California beach dude, but with Midwestern vowels, as open and flat as cornfields.) For the past year, she has been making a film, composed of still photographs, that combines her impulses: a reimagining of the sixties-era French art film “La Jetée,” which tells the story of a post-nuclear future in Paris. Opie’s film, “The Modernist,” is about an arsonist who is obsessed with L.A.’s landmark mid-century houses, and, driven to madness by their unattainability, starts methodically burning them down.

Opie got the idea for the film in the nineties, but, as often happens with her projects, it took on a new significance for her as she made it, with the election of a President who’d promised to return America to the halcyon days before feminism, globalism, and multiculturalism. “ ‘La Jetée’ was about the future,” Opie said. “ ‘The Modernist’ is about nostalgia. The story is about a longing for the past that we can’t obtain.”

“Untitled #41,” from “Freeways,” 1995.

Until Opie was thirteen, her family lived in Sandusky, Ohio. She spent her childhood “having sleepovers in people’s back yards in tents,” she said, “like real Norman fucking Rockwell.” Her mother was a gym teacher who became a housewife after she had children; her father, who died four years ago, ran OP Craft, his family’s art-supply company. He was a Republican, and had one of the country’s preëminent collections of political memorabilia. (One of Opie’s favorite artifacts from her inheritance is a commemorative ribbon made after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, whose likeness is embroidered on it in tiny stitches below the American flag, with the quotation “I have said nothing but what I am willing to live by, and if it be the pleasure of almighty God, to die by.”) Opie’s most vivid memories are of time spent outdoors. “We would roam the woods and the creeks by ourselves,” she said. “All summer long, we’d be on our bikes, riding to the candy store.”

Opie’s parents bought her a starter camera when she was in fourth grade, after she did a book report on Lewis Hine, who took startling portraits of child laborers across America and of immigrants coming in through Ellis Island. “He made the first photographs that actually created a change in laws and policies, and I just realized how important photography really is,” Opie said. “It was a real time of pictorialism in terms of magazines—you had Life, you had Look, you had National Geographic. So, in the same way you have kids looking at Instagram, there were always magazines around our house.” She took pictures of her parents, her block, her friends at the country club, her Barbie dolls. “I’ve pretty much been doing the same thing since I was nine,” she said. “I was making portraits of my friends. I was making self-portraits, I was making images of the neighborhood.” She was, as she likes to say, “mapping” her reality.

Or some of it. Her father was violent with her older brother—“brutalized him,” Opie said—and her brother, in turn, was violent with her. Her mother had an affair with a family friend, at her father’s behest. “Dad set it up because he wanted to be a swinger!” Opie told me. “But then she really fell in love. Mom was thinking of running away with him. He was probably just a dude having a good time.” Then her father told the family that he had cancer. “He went to the Cleveland Clinic—but always by himself, never with my mom—and the doctors told him to move to a warmer climate,” Opie said. “How much of that is true is a subject of debate in my family. I think what happened was my grandfather sold the company out from under him.”

“Untitled #9,” from “Wall Street,” 2001.

Whatever the reason, when Opie was thirteen her family moved to California, to a suburb of San Diego called Poway. At the new house, Opie set up a darkroom in a spare bathroom, and, by babysitting for the family next door, saved enough to buy a 35-mm. camera. “I kind of made friends by taking pictures,” she said. “I went to the high-school plays and started taking photographs. I fell in love with this one woman—I had a major crush on her at a time when you didn’t tell anybody that—and I would print out the pictures and give them to her and we became best friends.”

When Opie was sixteen, her parents divorced. “Dad drove my mom to a condo and said, ‘This is where you’re gonna live. I’m keeping the house and the kids,’ ” she told me. “Then my dad remarried immediately—he married this crazy woman, and my brother protected me from her in really nice ways. Like, he put a lock on my bedroom door when he realized she was crazy.” Her brother left to join the Air Force, and her father—less than a year into his second marriage—started having an affair with Opie’s mother, over at the condo. “It’s like a soap opera, I know,” she said. “The whole idea of the family unit was just totally chaotic and completely messed up for me.”

Opie’s work subverts expectations. In her photographs, surfers don’t surf: they wait for waves. “Untitled #4 (Surfers),” 2003. “Untitled #4 (Surfers),” 2003.

Yet Opie was reluctant to leave home. For two years after graduating from high school, she took classes at a community college, and worked at a camera store and as an outdoor-education counsellor. Eventually, she decided to become a teacher. “I knew I was really good with kids,” she said. “And I liked kids a lot.” At twenty, Opie left to study early-childhood education at Virginia Intermont College, a former women’s school that had recently gone coed. She began taking photography classes. “They were actually really dedicated artists, some of those professors,” she said. “For the first time in my entire life, I made it onto the dean’s list.” Opie believes that she might well have stayed in Virginia as a kindergarten teacher—“I think I would’ve ended up spending my whole life sitting on small chairs,” she said—if not for the intervention of a painter named Eleanor, who had been her father’s high-school girlfriend. “After my parents broke up the second time, she came out to California,” Opie said. “I’d broken my leg, and she painted this beautiful beach scene on my cast. Eleanor was an artist. She was from Sandusky, Ohio. She was just family right away—I knew what she was about.” During a college vacation, Opie visited Eleanor in New York City, and the two went out to photograph together. “She said, ‘You really are an artist. You’ve been doing this your whole life. You need to go to a major city and find an art school.’ And it just felt like the truth.”