Catherine Opie: American Photographer

Catherine Opie: American Photographer
Guggenheim Museum, New York
September 26 2008 – January 27 2009


Catherine Opie decided, as she recalls, that she wanted to be a photographer at the age of nine, when she wrote a report for school on child labor laws. Rather than basing her paper on the assigned reading, she wrote about what she learned from a photograph by the American documentary photographer Lewis Hine, reproduced in her social studies book, of a little girl working in a cotton mill in North Carolina. Opie then declared to her parents at dinner that she wanted to be a social documentary photographer (however a nine-year old might word that) and soon began taking photographs of her family and neighborhood. The impassioned nine-year-old did grow up to become a prolific photographer, and nearly four decades later she is the subject of a penetrating mid-career retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York.


Opie is most famous for her commanding portraits of pierced and tattooed Californians of the S/M and queer communities taken in the early 1990s. But, unexpectedly, these images are not what introduce us to the artist at the Guggenheim; instead the show begins with elegant photographs of urban architecture from her Freeways (1994), Mini-malls (1997-98), Wall Street (2001) and Chicago (2004) series. In the tiny (2 ½ x 6 ½ in) photographs of LA freeways, sinuous streaks of highways intersect and project wildly in small frames on smooth paper with an incredible sense of velocity. The attention to formal beauty and the geometric harmony of architecture recalls the work of Walker Evans, but the artist explains that these images are also indebted to Maxime Du Camp’s photographs of Egyptian pyramids from the early 1950s. Each of Opie’s urban architecture photographs is totally void of people, lending a vivid sense of absence to the typically populated environments. The reverberating sense of loss and nostalgia that comes from this emptiness sharpens various layers of the communities that utilize these structures.

Opie’s approach to photography was shaped by her years at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she studied under Hank Wessel and Larry Sultan (Wessel photographs nude beaches, body builders and the woods of the American West and Sultan makes richly saturated images doused in the absurdity of domestic life). While in San Francisco Opie practiced street photography and participated in the city’s thriving leather fetish community. In 1988 she received an MFA from CalArts, at which time an interest in the intersection between critical theory and art making imbued the program with a highly conceptual focus. She took classes on feminist theory, which the artist says had a significant impact on her work, and came away from school with the tools to merge traditional documentary photography and a complex conceptual approach with incredible lyricism.

Shortly after making her Being and Having series in 1991, for which Opie photographed her lesbian friends as masculine personae, uncomfortably close-up and framed by a bright yellow background donning fake mustaches and other butch garb, she began her Portraits series. The artist took pictures of people she met in the S/M scene in San Francisco; drag queens, transsexuals, homosexuals, leather fetishists and so on, posed in front of backgrounds saturated with rich colors. The subjects are assertive, often confrontational, and seem proud of their physical identities and sexuality, except for one or two sitters who look sad and distant. Their exaggerated and serious poses, including hands on jutting hips in majestic full-body shots and the intense austerity of the full-frontal bust shots, recall Renaissance and Baroque traditions of portraiture, particularly Hans Holbein the Younger, whom the artist sites as an influence. The portraits were made at a time when homosexual identity was not yet in the public eye, and Opie felt it was important to make queer culture visible and give it a place in the mainstream social dialogue. She sought to push beyond Robert Mapplethorpe’s documentations of the gay male community to the capture the dynamism of the queer community as a whole.

The Portraits explore how we identify with each other through and build communities around dress and self-decoration. These images immediately reminded me of my teenage punk rock years, when I pierced and tattooed myself and amassed an extensive collection of Creepers shoes, bondage gear and rare records, largely for the sake of social interconnection and the sense of familial-like security that comes with fitting in with a tight-knit group. Various forms of bodily adornment allowed me to identify with people through my physical appearance, which can at times feel like the deepest, most powerful way to connect with others. It is evident in Opie’s photographs that the artist wholly understands such impulses.

In 1998 the photographer embarked on a two-month-long road trip across the country to photograph lesbian couples and families in their homes and environments. These large-scale color images, which comprise the Domestic Series, show women relaxing in pools and hanging out in their kitchens, bedrooms and backyards. A close heir to Opie’s project is JD Samson’s Lesbian Utopia, 2003, for which the musician/artist gathered a group of her friends into an RV and traveled around the United States. Samson later produced a calendar filled with striking images of her road trip misadventures accompanied by detailed notes. But, unlike the Lesbian Utopia images, the Domestic photographs are not an explicit celebration of lesbian lifestyle; they are studious and curious, asking questions about the dynamics of being a lesbian family with a child and exploring how lesbian couples function in their environments.

At the time that both photographs were taken, Opie did not yet have a family (she now has a son, Oliver, who appears in several of her later photographs). In a 2001 interview Opie explained: “Many of the images are suffused with longing. A lot of this is about my own desire. I’ve never really had a successful domestic relationship. I’ve always wanted one, but so far I’ve never lived successfully with anyone. So in the domestic series I was traveling around trying to figure out what it was all about.” Joanne, Betsy and Olivia, Bayside, New York, 1998, shows a lesbian couple sitting in their dining room, half-eaten food strewn across a table, as one mother bends down towards the couple’s young daughter, who holds a giant white pony doll, while the other mother relaxes in a chair. This image is a striking compliment to one of Opie’s few self-portraits, taken in the early 1990s, of her bleeding back etched with a crude drawing of her idea of a “happy family,” which includes two women standing under a cloud next to a house.

Opie also mutilated herself for Self-Portrait/Pervert, 1994, when she scratched the word “pervert” in elegant block letters into her chest, stuck over forty needles into her arms and posed in front of a lush, floral-patterned tapestry, nude from the waste up and wearing a black leather bondage mask that completely hid her face. Such severe physical violence links the photographer to other artists who have documented incredible instances of suffering and mutilation with photography and video, such as Valie Export, Hermann Niesch and the Vienna Actionists and Orlan.

For her most recent series, In and Around the Home, Opie took pictures around her house, family and L.A. neighborhood. Encountering these photographs at the end of the exhibition, it seems as if Opie’s camera has suddenly swollen to absorb a wealth of information about the antagonism, intimacy, passion and nuances that encompass a community. It becomes clear how focused her earlier work is despite the variety of her subjects; she picks a specific aspect of her subject and photographs it relentlessly from a categorical angle, like an academic arguing a thesis statement. In In and Around Home we encounter Polaroid photos of political coverage on TV, unusual objects tucked away in backyards and images of local protests and USC homecoming celebrations. The result is a compelling portrait of her domestic life and her neighborhood that exposes the tensions surrounding class and race as well as the infiltration of the media into the home and the tenderness of family life. The same overarching themes of her earlier work are present: community and identity, but Opie examines them with a newfound expansiveness. The result is deeply satisfying, leaving us in excited anticipation of her future projects.