Catherine Opie’s Arresting Photos of Beauty, Strength and Vulnerability

July 22, 2022

With the new exhibition, To What We Think We Remember, Catherine Opie analyzes how "photography can chronicle our lives, relationships, and work while simultaneously inviting us to consider the importance of collective responsibility as we barrel towards an uncertain future."

"At 61, Catherine Opie has paved the way for younger generations to use their own voice in the fight for human rights. As an LGBTQ+ elder who has been at the frontlines throughout her career, Opie understands the revolution is not a one-time event but an ongoing series of battles that require us to stay the course. “We need to keep showing up,” she tells AnOther.

With the new exhibition, To What We Think We Remember, Opie brings together works made over the past decade on travels across Europe and the United States, looking at the ways in which photography can chronicle our lives, relationships, and work while simultaneously inviting us to consider the importance of collective responsibility as we barrel towards an uncertain future. “I’m very concerned with what it is to be a woman, as well as queer woman right now,” Opie says just days before Roe v. Wade was overturned. “We haven’t moved forward in a way that a lot of us had hoped for at this time. In fact, I feel like we’re moving backward. We have to dig because the political is personal and the times are fraught.”

Between the perils of climate change, legislation against trans people, criminalisation of abortion, expansion of gun rights, and militarisation of the police, systems of power are acting in concert against citizens of the United States. As an artist and an educator, Opie has been no stranger to the fight, using photography to challenge the dominant narratives of society at large as well as within the medium itself." — Miss Rosen, June 29, 2022

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

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