This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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About the PhotographerCatherine Opie is an American fine-art photographer and educator. She lives and works in Los Angeles as a professor of photography at University of California at Los Angeles. Opie studies the connections between mainstream and infrequent society. By specializing in portraiture, studio, and landscape photography, she is able to create pieces relating to sexual identity. Through photography, Opie documents the relationship between the individual and the space inhabited. She is known for her portraits exploring the Los Angeles leather-dyke community. Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Opie is featured in the exhibition Face to Face: Portraits of Artists by Tacita Dean, Brigitte Lacombe and Catherine Opie at the International Center of Photography (running Jan 27–May 01, 2023). |
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Truth in Photography: Could you talk about the impetus for your photography?
Catherine Opie: It started when I was a child, but it's because of Lewis Hines’s photographs of child workers in factories in North Carolina specifically, that made me want to have a camera. And I really believe in the aspect of photography as a vehicle of documenting history.
TiP: What was it about the Lewis Hine photographs that attracted you?
Opie: I'm attracted to Lewis Hine’s photographs because of the relationship of what the camera can describe in terms of the physicality of these child workers. And that story, which is told to me through photographs, is very different than a story told through text. Texts and fiction can allow us to see, but the photograph showed those tiny hands, the dress, the way that the body was positioned. And it was profound.
Catherine Opie: It started when I was a child, but it's because of Lewis Hines’s photographs of child workers in factories in North Carolina specifically, that made me want to have a camera. And I really believe in the aspect of photography as a vehicle of documenting history.
TiP: What was it about the Lewis Hine photographs that attracted you?
Opie: I'm attracted to Lewis Hine’s photographs because of the relationship of what the camera can describe in terms of the physicality of these child workers. And that story, which is told to me through photographs, is very different than a story told through text. Texts and fiction can allow us to see, but the photograph showed those tiny hands, the dress, the way that the body was positioned. And it was profound.
TiP: How did they make you feel?
Opie: Fortunate that somebody actually changed child labor laws in the country. I grew up in Ohio. I grew up in a very interesting Republican household. My father owned a company that I was taken to as a child, and I worked on weekends, because he had to work over the weekend, and he had us often to give my mom a break. I sat there in his factory earning a penny for every cork I put in a salt and pepper shaker. And so, I had some idea of what labor was, even though it wasn't a real job. But just the idea of a child standing there for 12 hours, I could barely do 30 minutes of putting corks in wooden salt and pepper shakers.
Opie: Fortunate that somebody actually changed child labor laws in the country. I grew up in Ohio. I grew up in a very interesting Republican household. My father owned a company that I was taken to as a child, and I worked on weekends, because he had to work over the weekend, and he had us often to give my mom a break. I sat there in his factory earning a penny for every cork I put in a salt and pepper shaker. And so, I had some idea of what labor was, even though it wasn't a real job. But just the idea of a child standing there for 12 hours, I could barely do 30 minutes of putting corks in wooden salt and pepper shakers.
TiP: Could you talk about your first photographic series?
Opie: It's interesting to talk about my first photographic series because I actually think that I made a series at nine without knowing I was making a series. That was mapping my neighborhood in Sandusky, Ohio, photographing every stop sign, every fire hydrant, a cornfield across from our house. That was an early mapping, and a notion of mapping, that I couldn't even articulate. But I would have never called it a series. TiP: At what point in your life did you start making portraits? Opie: The first photographs I made on my camera that I was given on my birthday were portraits. The very first frame is my father, with his army coffee mug, with his fresh, clean shirt on before he's going off to work at O-P Craft with his hair slicked back. The second portrait is my mom in her bathrobe with her hair disheveled in the kitchen, obviously, having just served my dad the coffee. And then my third one was a self-portrait of me making muscles, which is in the Phaidon book. And then the fourth one was of my brother. So those were the first four frames of the brand-new camera that I got when I was a kid for my birthday. And then it proceeded to be portraits of people in my neighborhood and at the country club, and my cat, and Barbie. |
TiP: How has your process of making portraits evolved over the years?
Opie: I was formally educated in the arts, getting both a bachelor's degree and a master's degree around the medium of photography. The work gets informed also through your act of not only making it for your entire life, but also the act of what it means to be critiqued and looked at and thought of in that relationship to the criticality of what being an artist is. And I would say that that doesn't necessarily influence the way that I make work, but it certainly makes me dig deeper into the history of representation.
TiP: What is your process? When you decide on a photographic subject, at what point do you feel like you understand how you want to make the portrait? How do you make a portrait?
Opie: Portraits are made in different ways depending on the setting. If it's a studio portrait, they're made very specifically in relationship to the notion of a shared moment. I don't believe in essentialist ideas that a portrait captures the soul of a person or anything like that. For me, every single portrait is based on certain formal aesthetics that I like to employ within my work. But it is really a very quick, quiet, shared moment. The portraits look like they take a long time, but I try to get everybody out within 30 to 40 minutes and that's lighting and everything. I don't play music. It's quiet. But it is a shared moment.
TiP: Do you direct your subjects?
Opie: I do direct them. That is because I really want spaces in between arms. If I'm using a colored background, I need to position the body so that it pops in a different way. I'm also playing with certain tropes in terms of classical painting, portraiture, looking at posture or fingers, like Oliver & Mrs. Nibbles. I have his hand very much like Da Vinci's hand in The Lady with an Ermine. I don't want to repeat art history within these gestures, but I certainly want to cognitively recognize the history of art in relationship to how I frame portraiture.
Opie: I was formally educated in the arts, getting both a bachelor's degree and a master's degree around the medium of photography. The work gets informed also through your act of not only making it for your entire life, but also the act of what it means to be critiqued and looked at and thought of in that relationship to the criticality of what being an artist is. And I would say that that doesn't necessarily influence the way that I make work, but it certainly makes me dig deeper into the history of representation.
TiP: What is your process? When you decide on a photographic subject, at what point do you feel like you understand how you want to make the portrait? How do you make a portrait?
Opie: Portraits are made in different ways depending on the setting. If it's a studio portrait, they're made very specifically in relationship to the notion of a shared moment. I don't believe in essentialist ideas that a portrait captures the soul of a person or anything like that. For me, every single portrait is based on certain formal aesthetics that I like to employ within my work. But it is really a very quick, quiet, shared moment. The portraits look like they take a long time, but I try to get everybody out within 30 to 40 minutes and that's lighting and everything. I don't play music. It's quiet. But it is a shared moment.
TiP: Do you direct your subjects?
Opie: I do direct them. That is because I really want spaces in between arms. If I'm using a colored background, I need to position the body so that it pops in a different way. I'm also playing with certain tropes in terms of classical painting, portraiture, looking at posture or fingers, like Oliver & Mrs. Nibbles. I have his hand very much like Da Vinci's hand in The Lady with an Ermine. I don't want to repeat art history within these gestures, but I certainly want to cognitively recognize the history of art in relationship to how I frame portraiture.
TiP: It's fascinating to watch the way your work has evolved, because you're always pushing the envelope as it relates to self-portraiture and the people that you photograph. You must work very hard to keep a freshness, to not duplicate yourself. You’re always pushing a new aesthetic.
Opie: Who wants to make the same picture over and over again? I guess some people, actually, that is what they're trying to do. But I'm far more curious about what the medium can do than I am in making the same kind of picture over and over again.
Opie: Who wants to make the same picture over and over again? I guess some people, actually, that is what they're trying to do. But I'm far more curious about what the medium can do than I am in making the same kind of picture over and over again.
TiP: Could you talk about making a self-portrait? What's the process?
Opie: I think of the self-portraits as more performative in relationship to ideas around my own identity or performing that identity in different ways. That certainly was true about the early 1990s self-portraits. And even when you look at the self-portrait of when I was nine, I'm making muscles. It's a performance. The interesting thing is I've only taken a few portraits where I'm just myself, but I'm not sure that those are very interesting. I think it's much more interesting to make a statement with your body in terms of a self-portrait than just purely a representation of oneself.
TiP: In what ways are these photographs performative?
Opie: I think the act of carving a self-portrait cutting on my back, and then putting my back to a camera with a very distinctive green fabric background that puts a bowl of fruit directly over my head is very performative.
Opie: I think of the self-portraits as more performative in relationship to ideas around my own identity or performing that identity in different ways. That certainly was true about the early 1990s self-portraits. And even when you look at the self-portrait of when I was nine, I'm making muscles. It's a performance. The interesting thing is I've only taken a few portraits where I'm just myself, but I'm not sure that those are very interesting. I think it's much more interesting to make a statement with your body in terms of a self-portrait than just purely a representation of oneself.
TiP: In what ways are these photographs performative?
Opie: I think the act of carving a self-portrait cutting on my back, and then putting my back to a camera with a very distinctive green fabric background that puts a bowl of fruit directly over my head is very performative.
TiP: How do you balance truth and fiction in your work?
Opie: My impetus for being an artist and a photographer was to be a social documentarian. And I would say that I am a social documentarian still to the core. But I'm actually interested more in the subtleties of the poetics and the metaphors that come up within image making that are also mirrored within the world of fiction. What is in my subconscious that can come out in relationship to any given photograph? And that's partly what the abstract landscapes are trying to do in relationship to the portraits on black, is to connote that opposition of our cognitive relationship to the way that we read images.
Opie: My impetus for being an artist and a photographer was to be a social documentarian. And I would say that I am a social documentarian still to the core. But I'm actually interested more in the subtleties of the poetics and the metaphors that come up within image making that are also mirrored within the world of fiction. What is in my subconscious that can come out in relationship to any given photograph? And that's partly what the abstract landscapes are trying to do in relationship to the portraits on black, is to connote that opposition of our cognitive relationship to the way that we read images.
TiP: I think in that dynamism that's created, it drives one to a deeper understanding or maybe to ask more provocative questions. We interviewed Olivia Arthur for the 2023 Winter Edition, who has made some photos in the Middle East. She says that she doesn't really understand what she's seeing, but she doesn't want to pretend to be fully understanding it in the way she makes the photograph. It's a reflection of her perception of what's there.
Opie: That's the complicated nature of journalism within photography. If you are not representing the territory that you know and that you're a part of culturally, then you are going to miss certain signifiers and certain aspects of what it is to make a complicated image versus an image that is representational of strife or an incredible injustice in terms of humanity. I've been very aware and tracking what the images are doing in relationship to the war in Ukraine right now. What do these images do to a certain extent? But I'm also so grateful for them.
TiP: Many of the photographs are never published in the mainstream news media. There's a lot of debate as to whether these images should ever be shown. And my personal feeling is they have to be shown.
Opie: I have such great respect for people bearing witness in that way because it's not something that I could actually do. I realize that my way of talking about things is more from a generation of an artist who was trained in art school and tries to work on larger social issues in relationship to long documentary projects or just moments of looking at different aspects of it. But I don't think that I could ever be a photographer working in the field, especially in relationship to war.
TiP: Talk about the concept of bearing witness, and how you prefer that to the word truth.
Opie: Truth is sticky. Truth is when somebody places their hand on a Bible and they swear to tell the truth. We saw a president of the United States place their hand on a Bible and swear to uphold the Constitution. Obviously, his notion of truth of Constitution isn't the legal definition of what the Constitution is in relationship to our rights and our country. So, what is truth, is the biggest question for me, and I prefer bearing witness because there is an ability for you to understand that it's also the singular perspective of the person holding the camera. That it doesn't have this overall reaching notion of what truth is in relationship to legal systems or ideologies. Bearing witness has a much cleaner sensibility about what’s happening with the camera, in my mind.
Opie: That's the complicated nature of journalism within photography. If you are not representing the territory that you know and that you're a part of culturally, then you are going to miss certain signifiers and certain aspects of what it is to make a complicated image versus an image that is representational of strife or an incredible injustice in terms of humanity. I've been very aware and tracking what the images are doing in relationship to the war in Ukraine right now. What do these images do to a certain extent? But I'm also so grateful for them.
TiP: Many of the photographs are never published in the mainstream news media. There's a lot of debate as to whether these images should ever be shown. And my personal feeling is they have to be shown.
Opie: I have such great respect for people bearing witness in that way because it's not something that I could actually do. I realize that my way of talking about things is more from a generation of an artist who was trained in art school and tries to work on larger social issues in relationship to long documentary projects or just moments of looking at different aspects of it. But I don't think that I could ever be a photographer working in the field, especially in relationship to war.
TiP: Talk about the concept of bearing witness, and how you prefer that to the word truth.
Opie: Truth is sticky. Truth is when somebody places their hand on a Bible and they swear to tell the truth. We saw a president of the United States place their hand on a Bible and swear to uphold the Constitution. Obviously, his notion of truth of Constitution isn't the legal definition of what the Constitution is in relationship to our rights and our country. So, what is truth, is the biggest question for me, and I prefer bearing witness because there is an ability for you to understand that it's also the singular perspective of the person holding the camera. That it doesn't have this overall reaching notion of what truth is in relationship to legal systems or ideologies. Bearing witness has a much cleaner sensibility about what’s happening with the camera, in my mind.
TiP: Bearing witness is a fuller description of the process. That's what a photographer does. A photographer is bearing witness. You're seeing the world; you're framing the world. You're trying to compose what you're seeing into something that evokes something deeper that's beyond the picture.
Opie: With portraiture, I view it as a shared moment. Now, when I'm making portraits of young men on the edge of a football field that I have just met, it’s not necessarily as much of a shared moment as it is bearing witness. There are these different moments, even in my own photography, because when a young football player stands before me, there's a whole line of other football players behind them. And I have maybe 4 to 5 minutes with each player. That's not really a shared moment. That is bearing witness. I'm not gaining any more information out of them than what's happening before the camera at that moment on the football field, before they get to go home and consume an enormous amount of calories to turn around and go do that again with their bodies. When I'm doing political marches, and I stand in the middle of the march and the march passes past me, that's bearing witness. They are portraits of a collective moment within a specific time in history of a given day of that protest. But it isn't necessarily about the individual as it is about the collective, but that's a portrait of the collective. There's a lot of different ways that I'm using these genres within photography, and I’m also trying to ask ourselves as viewers to figure out what is the iconic shift within the definitions of these genres that are so well defined by a very short history of photographic representation.
Opie: With portraiture, I view it as a shared moment. Now, when I'm making portraits of young men on the edge of a football field that I have just met, it’s not necessarily as much of a shared moment as it is bearing witness. There are these different moments, even in my own photography, because when a young football player stands before me, there's a whole line of other football players behind them. And I have maybe 4 to 5 minutes with each player. That's not really a shared moment. That is bearing witness. I'm not gaining any more information out of them than what's happening before the camera at that moment on the football field, before they get to go home and consume an enormous amount of calories to turn around and go do that again with their bodies. When I'm doing political marches, and I stand in the middle of the march and the march passes past me, that's bearing witness. They are portraits of a collective moment within a specific time in history of a given day of that protest. But it isn't necessarily about the individual as it is about the collective, but that's a portrait of the collective. There's a lot of different ways that I'm using these genres within photography, and I’m also trying to ask ourselves as viewers to figure out what is the iconic shift within the definitions of these genres that are so well defined by a very short history of photographic representation.