I saw the big show of work by Catherine Opie, American Photographer at the Guggenheim, but I must say the book is just as good as the show. And you can find her work online too.
Welcome to her own special approach to photography. And enjoy it. She doesn’t stay at home copying work by other photographers or hanging goldfish from the ceiling.
She is engaged, and she is open to comments from her friends, which I found refreshing. Early reviews of the show have focused, maybe obsessed, on her involvement with an S&M scene in California, and indeed her pictures do have impact, including a self-portrait with 46 eight-gauge needles in her arms. Oh, did I mention she is wearing a leather hood and has “pervert” across her bare chest, written in the somewhat healed results of pinpricks. A lesbian, she writes about the way mainstream gays were pushing the fringe gays out of sight in their effort to attain respectability.
In a later portrait she is nursing her son.
Wear your preconceptions lightly.
The daughter of a southern California real estate agent who wanted her to get a license, she has a great awareness of her surroundings. What I admire most about Obie is her range. Many photographers stick with one type of subject and one type of camera – 35 mm or large format, color or black and white, landscapes or street photography.
Obie is all over the place and does it all extremely well. Portraits, large format Polaroids, panoramic color pictures of mini-malls on the edge of Korean neighborhoods, and some excellent work around the time she was a student of master plan communities in Valencia, CA, showing exteriors, construction and essays on two families. See what results from growing up in a real estate family?
She takes the new suburbs straight on with no one of the condescension that some photographers have shown in years past. Maybe, by now, artists, writers and photographers have realized that suburbs are not dangerous alien life forms.
She also toured the country shooting lesbian couples in images of intense normalcy; one suspects their homes and yards are little different from others in their neighborhood.
During a fellowship at the Walker in Minneapolis she went out and photographed the ice fishing houses that northern sportsmen haul out onto frozen lakes across Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota to fish, swap stories, drink beer and get out of the house. She also has photographed Lake Michigan at different times of the year, large format pictures where the view has to look carefully to find a horizon, and more panoramics, black and white, of the underside of Chicago bridges and elevated roadways at night. And there are California freeways devoid of vehicles and looking lovely and sculptural, and after friends said she was just shooting queers she did a series on surfers.
Her work is a wonderful counter to the worries at the Met that there is nothing left to shoot but self-referential photographs about photography. She started with a close circle and images of herself, but she didn’t stop there. The result is an enjoyable, provocative, and highly appealing body of work.
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