Department of Art Professor Catherine Opie's photographs at LACMA
Catherine Opie’s Intimate Photographs of S&M
Of Professor Catherine Opie's exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hyperallergic says the works "have a tidal effect, washing the viewer in the intimate beauty of an act that’s meant for the privacy of lovers, now tenderly laid bare."
"LOS ANGELES — If you visited LA this summer, it would have been hard for you to ignore the presence of Robert Mapplethorpe. With a massive retrospective jointly organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the Getty Center, he was in the air. On my visit to LACMA, however, I left the large exhibition behind to seek out the work of an artist who’s often associated with Mapplethorpe, because of their commonality of photographing BDSM and queer communities: Catherine Opie. She also has an exhibition on view at LACMA, of her well-known O Portfolio, a series of photographs of S&M practices that started as a reaction of sorts to Mapplethorpe’s controversial X Portfolio (1978).
The seven pieces in Opie’s portfolio display a raw tenderness and explicit sexuality. While the work captures, in a way, San Francisco’s bondage community at the time — the series was produced over the course of a year, with Opie inviting friends into her studio and constructing the images — its focus is less documentation and more an illumination of intimacy. The understated photographs are laced with delicacy, while at the same time broaching a subject that was then, and to some extent still is now, taboo. There’s a romance to the work, a palpable beauty, as Opie gives the viewer a window onto a world they may never have experienced. The tightly composed photographs all zero in on their subjects — a thigh, a rope, streaks of blood — with an unflinching gaze, placing you, for a brief moment, in that world.
The gaze is tempered by the soft focus of the images, which creates a balance between the graphicness some associate with BDSM and the romance Opie wanted to convey. The black-and-white palette adds a feeling of timelessness. The portfolio was created in 1999 — a moment when the effects of the culture wars were being felt, AIDS was being formally recognized as a national threat, and the leather community was still viewed as radical. Opie’s work served as a bridge from subculture to broader culture; she used a formal approach to image making as a means of humanizing what was viewed as a morally subversive subject."— Erin Joyce, August 31, 2016
Read the full article at the Hyperallergic website.
Read another review of Opie's LACMA exhibition at the Huffington Post website.