Remembrance of Things Past
Catherine Opie's photography seeks to discover the soul of her subjects and understand their state of mind at the moment of being photographed.
"When I was a little boy, not more than ten or eleven, I would label photographs. In our apartment in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn—I lived there with my mother, an older sister, and my little brother—photographs were kept in boxes or in albums, in which after a while the thick paper they had been affixed to would tear or, if touched, start to crumble altogether. I was always afraid of losing the photographs we had managed to save, because that would mean losing memories—memories of things that, more often than not, I was too young to have lived with the people in them.
Catherine Opie: Hilton, 2013 But what did that matter? I wanted to love people and their stories, because everyone had a story: photographs told us that. And so did the eventual subjects of photographs. This I knew because my mother listened to so many of them, on the phone and in her small kitchen, where pots steamed and sometimes hissed as Mr. X or Ms. Y sat at the dining table with the Formica top, talking and talking, pleased to be—at last!—seen and heard.
In the living room, I handled photographs very carefully. I thought that if a snapshot of a woman prettily poised in black and white on some front porch, for example, were treated less gingerly, then she herself was being carelessly handled. I wanted the world to be as cared for as I cared for those photographs."— Hilton Als, May 13, 2021
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the New York Review website.
Read more about Catherine Opie.
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