Catherine Opie on Her First Monograph, “a Map of My Mind”

For Opie, photographing is about “understanding what it is to be inclusive.”

July 27, 2021

Catherine Opie joined the UCLA Department of Art faculty in 2001. One of the preeminent artists of her generation working with photography, Opie is known for her evocative images of contemporary America that have been featured in major museum exhibitions around the world. Opie has chosen a myriad of subjects throughout her career, including the S/M community, city buildings, domestic life, high school football players, surfers, and President Barack Obama’s first inauguration. At UCLA, Opie teaches graduate and undergraduate students in photography.

Catherine Opie, “Jesse” (1995), chromogenic print, 20 × 16 inches, featured in Children (1995–2004) (image courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Lehmann Maupin, New York/Hong Kong/Seoul/London; Thomas Dane Gallery, London and Naples; and Peder Lund, Oslo)

"LOS ANGELES — Catherine Opie’s work is not easy to encapsulate. I could tell you that the queer, Los Angeles-based photographer’s portraits and landscapes, presented in a new monograph by Phaidon, explore the concepts of community, identity, and judgment. But that would be defining her work, and the whole point, as Opie says, is to allow viewers to bring what they will to each of her photographs — to encourage people to navigate rather than conclude.

“I’m less into leaving a legacy and more interested in leaving a map of my mind,” Opie said during a phone interview.

In the book, Opie’s mind is mapped onto the categories of “People,” “Places,” and “Politics.” The thematic organization works well with her freeform interests and habit of revisiting subjects and sitters across the years, including moving portraits of friend and artist Pig Pen and a child-turned-young-adult named Jesse. Introduced by art historian Elizabeth A. T. Smith and concluded with a thoughtful conversation between Opie and curator and writer Charlotte Cotton, the monograph spans 30 years of Opie’s explorations into deeply personal territory and across the ever-shifting boundaries of identity.

For those who are familiar with Opie’s work, it’s likely that what first come to mind are the seminal 1990s portraits of herself and friends from the queer leather community, made as countercries against the vitriol being spewed at the queer community during the height of the AIDS epidemic. Showing “Self-Portrait/Pervert” at the 1995 Whitney Biennial — which depicts Opie shirtless, wearing a leather mask and chaps, with piercings through her arms and “Pervert” cut into her chest in stylized letters — was both an early landmark of her career and a powerful, vulnerable act. But Opie’s goal for the book, she said, is to introduce audiences to “the larger breadth of my practice.” Her portraits have been followed by landscape series and close examinations of other communities as well as a 20-year teaching career at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she was recently appointed chair of the UCLA Department of Art. The self-portraits were an essential starting point for her, but Opie has much more to share." —  Anne Wallentine, Jul. 20, 2021

This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Hyperallergic website.

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