Catherine Opie


Catherine Sue Opie is an American fine art photographer and educator. She lives and works in Los Angeles, as a professor of photography at the University of [California at Los Angeles|University of California, Los Angeles].
Opie studies the connections between mainstream and infrequent society. By specializing in portraiture, studio, and landscape photography, she is able to create pieces relating to sexual identity. Through photography, Opie documents the relationship between the individual and the space inhabited, offering an exploration of the American identity, particularly probing the tensions between the constructed American dream and the diverse realities of its citizens. Merging conceptual and documentary styles, Opie's oeuvre gravitates towards portraiture and landscapes, utilizing serial images and unexpected compositions to both spotlight and blur the lines of gender, community, and place while invoking the formal gravitas reminiscent of Renaissance portraiture and hinting at her deep engagement with the history of art and painting.
She is known for her portraits exploring the Los Angeles leather-dyke community. Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and she has won awards including the United States Artists Fellowship and the President’s Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Women’s Caucus for Art.

Life

Opie was born in Sandusky, Ohio. She spent her early childhood in Ohio and was influenced heavily by photographer Lewis Hine. On her 9th birthday, she received a Kodak Instamatic camera and immediately began taking photographs of her family and community. One of her first photographs was a self-portrait of her making muscles. She evolved as an artist at age 14 when she created her own darkroom. Her family moved from Ohio to California in 1975. She earned a Bachelor of Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1985.
She later received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the California Institute of the Arts in 1988. Before arriving at CalArts, she was a strictly black-and-white photographer. Opie's thesis project entitled Master Plan examined a wide variety of topics. Her early work was said to focus on the raping of landscapes. The project looked deeper into construction sites, advertisement schemes, homeowner regulations, and the interior layout of their homes within the community of Valencia, California.
In 1988, Opie moved to Los Angeles, California, and began working as an artist. She supported herself by accepting a job as a lab technician at the University of California, Irvine. Opie and her former partner, painter Julie Burleigh, constructed working studios in the backyard of their home in South Central Los Angeles.
In 2001, Opie gave birth to a boy named Oliver through intrauterine insemination.
At the Hammer Museum, Opie was on the first Artist Council and served on the board of overseers. Along with fellow artists John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger, and Ed Ruscha, Opie served as a member of the board for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In 2012, she and the others resigned; however, they joined the museum's 14-member search committee for a new director after Jeffrey Deitch's resignation in 2013. Opie returned in support of the museum's new director, Philippe Vergne, in 2014. She was also on the board of the Andy Warhol Foundation.
Along with Richard Hawkins, Opie curated a selection of work by the late artist Tony Greene at the 2014 Whitney Biennial, in New York. As of 2017, Opie has her studio at The Brewery Art Colony.

Work

Art

Opie's work is characterized by a combination of formal concerns, a variety of printing technologies, references to art history, and social/political commentary. It demonstrates a mix between traditional photography and unconventional subjects. For example, she explores abstraction in the landscape vis-a-vis the placement of the horizon line in the Icehouses and Surfers series. She has printed photographs using Chronochrome, Iris prints, Polaroids, and silver photogravure. Examples of art history references include the use of bright colour backgrounds in portraits that reference the work of Hans Holbein and the full-body frontal portraits that reference August Sander. Opie also depicts herself with her son in the traditional pose of Madonna and Child in Self Portrait/Nursing.
Opie's earlier work relies more heavily on documentary photography as opposed to allegorical, yet still provides a stark relationship to her investigation and use of powerful iconography throughout the years. The use of symbolic elements in Opie's works has allowed these portraits to sit separately from any of her previous works. For instance, the portrait Self Portrait/Pervert uses blood. The symbolism used in this work is recognised as a recurring statement for Opie, personally and allegorically. These images convey symbolic references to the celebration, embracing, and remembrance of the shift and personal relationship with one's body. Opie's use of blood is also seen in another work entitled Self-portrait/Cutting ''.
Opie first came to be known with Being and Having and Portraits, which portray queer communities in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Being and Having includes 13 colour photographs of Opie's lesbian friends and looks at the performance of gender identity and masculinity with visual reference to 17th-century Old Master portraiture.
Also exploring ideas of the outward portrayal of identity, in Dyke, Opie portrayed her friend Steakhouse who had the word 'dyke' tattooed on her neck, seen as an act of bravery at the time. This photograph was also the first time Opie used a fabric background for her portraits, again alluding to Old Master paintings. As such, she saw this photograph as existing within the history of painting, rather than photography.
In Portraits, Opie presents a variety of identities among the queer community, such as drag kings, cross-dressers, and F-to-M transexuals. Opie has referenced problems of visibility in the LGBT community, but in her images the reference to Renaissance paintings declares the individuals as saints or characters. Opie's portraits document, celebrate, and protect the community and individuals in which she photographs.
A common social/political theme in her work is the concept of community. Opie stated that "portraiture literally creates a history of one’s community". She has investigated aspects of community, making portraits of many groups including the LGBT community, surfers, and high school football players. Her work is informed by her identity as an out lesbian and "out of incredible love and dialogue with people who share my queer identity with me and what it meant at that time in our lives". Her works balance personal and political. Her assertive portraits bring queers to a forefront that is normally silenced by societal norms. Her work also explores how the idea of family varies between straight and LGBTQ communities. Opie highlights that LGBTQ households often base their families on close friendships and community, while straight families focus on their individual families. She is also interested in how identities are shaped by our surrounding architecture.
This Los Angeles-focused series sparked her ongoing project American Cities, which is a collection of panoramic black-and-white photographs of quintessential American cities. This series is similar to an earlier work of hers, Domestic, which documented her 2-month RV road trip, portraying lesbian families engaging in everyday household activities across the country.
Drawing inspiration from the transgressive photography of Robert Mapplethorpe, Nan Goldin, and sex radicals, who provided a space for liberals and feminists, Opie has also explored controversial topics and imagery in her work. In her O'' folio—6 photogravures from 1999—Opie photographed S-M porn images she took earlier for On Our Backs, but as extreme close-ups.
In 2011, Opie photographed the home of the actress Elizabeth Taylor in Bel Air, Los Angeles. Taylor died during the project and never met Opie. Opie took 3,000 images for the project; 129 comprised the completed study. The resultant images were published as 700 Nimes Road. Collector Daily noted the "relentless femininity of Taylor's taste" in the images contrasted with Opie's self-declared "identity as a butch woman" in Opie's forward to 700 Nimes Road and Opie's "status as an ordinary mortal" in comparison to Taylor's stardom.
Opie's first film, The Modernist, is a tribute to French filmmaker Chris Marker's 1962 classic La Jetée. Composed of 800 still images, the film features Pig Pen —a genderqueer performance artist—as the protagonist. The Modernist has been described as an ode to the city in which it takes place, Los Angeles, but it is also seen as questioning the legacy of modernism in America. In summary, the twenty-two-minute film is about an aggravated artist who just wants his own home as he has fallen in love with the architecture of Los Angeles. Being unable to purchase a place to live, the performance artist goes around burning down lovely architecture of LA.

Teaching

Opie's teaching career began in 2001 at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2019, UCLA announced Opie as the university’s inaugural endowed chair in the art department, a position underwritten by a $2-million gift from philanthropists Lynda and Stewart Resnick. She has also taught photography workshops at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, CO and Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA.

Publications

Notable works in public collections

Awards

In popular culture

Her name appears in the lyrics of the Le Tigre song "Hot Topic."

Links to Works

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