Catherine Opie Reflects on a Career Documenting Queer Life

June 2, 2021

Art professor Catherine Opie, known for her portraits depicting queer life in California throughout the 1990s, is releasing a photo book chronicling her 40-year career, which she calls "a full, up-to-date examination of my work."

Gina & April, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1998. Courtesy Catherine Opie and Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Lehmann Maupin, New York/Hong Kong/Seoul/London; Thomas Dane Gallery, London and Naples; and Peder Lund, Oslo. Domestic, 1995–1998.

"Catherine Opie is well-known for her portraits depicting queer life in California throughout the 1990s—but her oeuvre consists of so much more. To chronicle it all, the artist is releasing a new photo book titled Catherine Opie, out June 16 with Phaidon. Over 300 photos from the artist’s 40-year career have been selected for the tome, which Opie calls “a full, up-to-date examination of my work.”

Although queer identity is a central theme of Catherine Opie, the book also highlights three major themes; people, politics, and place. There are photos of Malibu surfers, high school quarterbacks, highway overpasses and images of the Alaskan landscape. And then there are images from protests in San Francisco protests during the 1980s, and the Black Lives Matter protests taken last summer in Los Angeles. “It was after George Floyd died, after the national protests had mounted,” says Opie on Zoom from Rome, where the artist is doing an artist residency. “There is a ‘documentary moment’ in my photos, which could be a journalistic moment, but then I land you in a vacant place that you then have to ponder what you’re really looking at.”

Further demonstrating her versatility, Opie’s domestic interior series, which she shot inside Elizabeth Taylor’s extravagant Bel Air estate, are also included in the book. The moving, intimate series includes photos of Taylor’s lavish perfume collection, her Chanel shoes and her living room, which was adorned with old paintings.

“I had no idea she would pass away in the middle of the body of work, but that’s what happened,” Opie says. “It ended up being the last portrait of Elizabeth Taylor.""— Nadja Sayej, Jun. 2, 2021

This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the W Magazine website.
Read more about Catherine Opie.

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