Catherine Opie

Catherine Opie began to photograph as a child

Catherine Opie was born in 1961 in Sandusky, Ohio, where she spent her childhood. She received her first camera at the age of nine, a Kodak Instamatic, and began straight away to photograph her immediate vicinity; by the age of fourteen, she had her own darkroom. An important early influence on her artistic development was the photographer Lewis Hine. In 1975, she moved with her family to California, where more opportunities for a career as an artist were available, and in 1985, graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute. Continuing her studies at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in Valencia, she also ventured into colour photography – up until then, all of her pictures had been on black and white film. For her dissertation, Opie conceived the Master Plan project (1988), for which she studied building regulations, construction practices and interior design of private houses in the Californian community of Valencia. 

Breakthrough as photographer with portraits of the queer scene

After graduating, Catherine Opie settled as a freelance artist in Los Angeles in 1988. Together with her partner, the painter Julie Burleigh, she set up a studio in the backyard of their home in South Central Los Angeles. In the 1990s, she created works that drew on artistic traditions of Renaissance and Baroque art where the actual motif formed the centrepoint of each composition, framed by a richly detailed background and illuminated by an effective light source. Catherine Opie became famous above all for her portraits of people from the queer scene, created between 1993 and 1997. The artist had developed her own language of symbols and attributes for her portrait photography, a private iconography for which she used recurring elements such as blood. Whilst her early work focused more on documentary qualities, an allegorical power emerged in later work. Many of her portraits are almost life-size and were created with the help of special Polaroid cameras. 

Powerful visual examination of controversial topics

With her portraits, Catherine Opie wishes to make visible the complex diversity of identities within the queer community. In the tradition of Robert Mapplethorpe and Nan Goldin, she does not shy away from controversial themes, as her extreme close-ups from the S&M scene show. She also often makes self-portraits, for which the artist poses, sometimes unclothed, smeared in blood and marked by scars. In her more recent work, Opie has increasingly concentrated on architecture in urban spaces: In 2011, she photographed the home of the film diva Elizabeth Taylor, who died during the project, before she could meet the photographer. From around 3000 photographs, Catherine Opie selected 129 pictures and published them under the programmatic title 700 Nimes Road. Alongside her artistic work, Opie has taught as Professor of Photography at the University of Los Angeles since 2001. In 2017, she made her first film, The Modernist, a tribute to French filmmaker Chris Marker. 

Catherine Opie lives and works in Los Angeles and New York.