Catherine Opie

Catherine Opie

Catherine Opie (born 1961 in Ohio) is an American artist specializing in issues within documentary photography. Opie is currently a professor of Photography at University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). She lives and works in West Adams, Los Angeles.


Opie spent her early childhood in Ohio, but her family moved near San Diego when she was 13 years old. She studied childhood education for a year as an undergraduate, but soon went to the San Francisco Art Institute to earn her bachelor of fine arts degree. She obtained a master's degree from California Institute of the Arts School of Art in 1988. Her thesis project Master Plan (1986–88) examined the planned communities of Valencia, California, from construction sites and advertisement schemes, to homeowner regulations and the domestic interiors of residents' homes. In 1989 Opie moved to Los Angeles and began working as an artist, supporting herself until 1994 as a lab technician at the University of California, Irvine.
Opie and her companion, painter Julie Burleigh,[8] built several studios in the backyard of their house in South Central Los Angeles.


Opie's work is characterized by a combination of formal concerns, a variety of printing technologies, references to art history, and social/political commentary. An example of formal concerns include addressing issues of the horizon line in the "ice house" and "surfer" series. She has printed photographs using chromochrome, iris prints, Polaroids, and silver photogravure. Examples of art history references include the use of bright color backgrounds in portraits which reference the work of Hans Holbein[10] and the full body frontal portraits that reference August Sander. A common social/political theme in her work is the concept of community. Opie has investigated aspects of community, making portraits of many groups including LGBT community; surfers; and most recently high school football players. Opie is interested in how identities are shaped by our surrounding architecture. Her work is informed by her identity as an out lesbian.[11] Her works balance personal and political. Her assertive portraits bring queers to a forefront that is normally silenced by societal norms.


Catherine Opie has multiple bodies of work:
Master Plan (1986–88)
Being and Having (1991)
Portraits (1993-97) Chromogenic Prints in various sizes. These portraits of "queer" people references August Sander and Hans Holbein.


PORTRAITS


“I always tell the people I’m photographing not to look at the lens but to look through the lens. I want them to look through you a little bit. I told them I wanted them to be in a really special place inside their heads, to be kind of dreamy and confident at the same time.”

Portraits

Opie’s Portraits series, encompassing more than fifty photographs created between 1993 and 1997, synthesizes an approach that is at once grounded in documentary tradition and deeply personal. The subject matter is her community of gay and lesbian friends. As part of a community that is not represented in mainstream American culture, Opie sought to provide visibility and representation to her friends and the community at large.

Opie creates discrete bodies of work in series, each with specific parameters. Portraits reflects a typological tradition that can be traced from nineteenth-century archival documentation through August Sander’s People of the 20th Century project, which Opie has cited as an influence. Sander’s straightforward portraits, taken during the Weimar Republic, are frontal, centered in the frame, evenly lit, and present individuals organized by types such as “The Skilled Tradesman,” “Classes and Professions,” and “The Artists.” Although Opie’s photographs echo Sander's in many ways, she is careful to present her subjects on their own terms, without a repressive system of labeling.

In the tradition of the Northern Renaissance court painter Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/98–1543), Opie isolates her subjects against vibrantly colored backgrounds of blue, brown, green, purple, or red. She says, “the colored backdrop allows your eye to go through the photograph in a different way than if it was, say, a person sitting in their house. It’s about separating the subject from their world, but still representing their world through their body.” The portraits are often three-quarter or bust-length shots, with the subjects standing or sitting, their eyes frequently locked with the lens in looks that range from boredom to defiance.

This highly formal style of composition is a means of paying tribute to her friends, who were unaccustomed to such dignified pictorial treatment. As Opie liked to think, “The photographs stare back, or they stare through you. They’re very royal. I say that my friends are like my royal family.”

Opie’s Portraits celebrate the bravery of her subjects’ decisions to craft their own identities in the face of restrictive social norms. The series documents this living community, rendering visible an otherwise invisible or misunderstood sector of American culture with characteristic respect and compassion.

I love her work in the pro trial of identity, culture, and the study of subcultures within the main cultural groups.

Her work has influenced me to look at the women in the body of work that I hope to complete.  
http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/education/school-educator-programs/teacher-resources/arts-curriculum-online?view=item&catid=728&id=99