Introduction
"I'm kind of a twisted social documentary photographer"
Catherine Opie is an extraordinary contemporary photographer. She was born in Ohio in 1961 and currently lives in Los Angeles. She received her MFA from
CalArts in 1988 and is on the staff of the University of California, Irvine.. Her work has appeared in group exhibitions from Paris to Australia to New
Orleans, including the 1995 Whitney Museum Biennial in New York and In a Different Light at the University Art Museum in Berkeley in 1995. Her solo
exhibitions include LA Freeways (San Francisco), Being and Having (New York). Her self portrait (Right) shows very much instantaneously that her work
is from the darker side of modern day are. Many famous artists do self portraits, but not with the face of themselves pointing in the opposite direction
to the camera, a major contradiction in it's self. This truly represents her unique style of looking into social, politics and other issues, which are filled
with corruption, contradictions and conflicting views.
Catherine Opie, often identifies with the lesbian sex radicals. She documents subcultural
ambiance in Los Angeles, a place full of so many different views, cultures and beliefs, the
glamour capital of the world is in general looked far deeper beyond the vastly underestimated eye.
So many elements making up such an intriguing place are looked into by Opie in such an abstract, realist fashion
that all her work stand out, makes people sit up and really look into the meanings. Such controversial subject matter
and presentation is what makes Opie far more interesting in comparison to similar modern day contemporary photographers.
She pushes the limits of propriety with self-portraits in
sadomasochistic leather, chains, and piercing and with images or words scratched
into her skin. Although her images are often life-sized color prints, lesbians more often
encounter the images reproduced small and in black and white. One of her more transgressive images
from this series of works was included in the 1995 Whitney Museum
Biennial.
Opie is a photographer who combines a breathtaking technical virtuosity with
subject matter which is alternately transgressive and shocking, classical and composed.
Catherine Opie shot to prominence in the mid 1990s with a spectacular sequence of Portraits
of her close friends within Los Angeles' leather community: transvestites, female-to-male transsexuals,
drag queens, body manipulators and others who pioneer the body as a site of sexual and aesthetic
experimentation. Opie created a sequence of elegant, gorgeously coloured portraits which give their
subjects a regal dignity: they stare back through us instead of being the ones continually stared at.
The series includes a number of self-portraits, including Bo, 1994. One of several Opie
alter-egos, Bo - a butch, mustachioed, tattooed truck driver - represents a different, darker side of
the artist. In other Self Portraits, Opie pushes this sense of psychic and physical self-exploration to
an extreme by subjecting her body to a series of painful manipulations. 'I wanted to push the whole
realm of beauty and elegance', she says, 'but also to make people scared out of their wits.'
Catherine Opie always understands the surface of things - whether the extravagantly decorated
bodies of her friends, or the facades of buildings in her local community - as expressive of the individual within.
Her move in 1995 to seemingly formal, architectural subjects was an unexpected departure, yet entirely
consistent with her concerns as an artist. 'My work is always close to home. It's always about my surroundings
and the way I wander through the world,' she says, 'It is about how communities begin to form and how people
try to change themselves.' The 'Houses and Landscapes' are pictures of houses, and at the same time, portraits
of the invisible individuals who occupy them. Shot head-on, these homes in middle-class LA suburbia have been
'personalised' in surprising ways by their inhabitants, while remaining firmly barricaded from the outside world.
This series was followed by Freeways, miniature platinum prints shot on a specially-made 7" x 17" 'Banquet' camera.
These soft, silvery pictures of LA's gigantic concrete roads and soaring flyovers are reminiscent of 19th century travellers' photographs
in the Holy Land or the Valley of the Kings. Photographed at dawn, and emptied of cars and people, they appear like ruins or
archeological sites being pictured for the first time. The Mini-malls also impart a sense of history to a cityscape which is famously
impermanent. Here Opie documents, with Becher-like objectivity, the prosaic shopping strips which have grown up around LA.
Whether in Korean, Japanese, or Mexican neighbourhoods, each Mini-mall expresses the ethnic identity and social life of the
community it serves, through the haphazard design of its shop fronts and signage.
Catherine Opie drove 9,000 miles across the States, stopping to photograph lesbian families and couples en route.
Domestic is a photographic 'love poem to relationships that flourish in the privacy of the home', a celebration of family life played out in
a way very different to that imagined in the American Dream. Intimate and lush, the series marks her return to colour portraiture and
continues to question what constitutes the ideal home and the ideal family. Also looking into other domestic issues, her far more harsh
looking pictures sway into the issues of domestic violence, troubles and the darker side of life that all families go through, but never go
through that front door, each to their own as it were. Her pictures provocative and interesting contain interest and intrigue for further
exploration. There never seems to be a dull moment in Opie's work each reeking individuality, interest and meaning.
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