An apparition takes shape in the diffused light filtering through the hazy morning fog that obscures the ocean view from Sunset Beach in Malibu. A lone surfer floating in the white foam of a shallow trough waits expectantly between incoming sets of waves. The artist’s eye of photographer Catherine Opie framed this moment of quiet anticipation in panorama, with the horizon line barely discernible as it separates air from water. For the viewer, Opie sought an ethereal perspective.
“I chose this place because I wanted it to feel as if you were floating out over the edge” — into water, into air, into a place where Opie has suspended time, space and a moment of unfulfilled, yet hopeful, expectation.
Even before the art world began to take notice more than a decade ago of the groundbreaking work of fine-arts photographer Catherine Opie, she was making compelling images that document what she calls “a specificity of place,” based on her lifelong fascination with the way “place” relates to identity, community and history.
In her latest series on surfers, recently exhibited in the 2004 Whitney Biennial in New York, Opie, a professor of art, has once again defined “place,” this time as the boundless ocean. Her interest here is not in the act of surfing, but in this liquid public space where temporary communities are created, where two surfers, strangers from different social strata, can form a temporary bond as they straddle their boards on the rolling swells and wait.
The 13 photographs of surfers off Malibu parallel an earlier body of work, Opie’s Icehouses series of 13 photographs of brightly painted ice-fishing shacks on a frozen lake near Minneapolis. Spending hours outdoors with her 8x10 camera fighting frostbite and frozen film in blizzard conditions, Opie caught the horizon line above the frozen lake that stretches across the winter landscape, barely separating gray sky from ice and snow. Both series reflect Opie’s fascination with temporary communities. “Like surfing, the icehouses create temporary communities on the water,” explains the artist. “For both the Pacific Ocean and this lake, you have to be a millionaire to live on the land. But the water and the frozen lake are public spaces. A stoner guy can be next to a neurosurgeon. They end up being part of the same community.”
She has photographed the urban sprawl of Los Angeles, with its tangle of freeways and ubiquitous mini-malls surrounded by multiethnic signage. She has shot Beverly Hills mansions and tract homes in master-planned Valencia. For a series she titled A Long Way From Paris, she spent two years tracking with her camera the gradual dislocation of an immigrant community in her MacArthur Park neighborhood as corridors for the new Metro Rail were tunneled underneath. She captured the stark emptiness of Wall Street with the ill-fated twin towers in the background just three weeks before 9/11. She brought into view the enclosed skyways that crisscross downtown Minneapolis.
In her zeal to focus on her own leather community in Los Angeles in the early ’90s, Opie gave the world a startling look at gays, lesbians, sadomasochists, bisexuals and transgenders. “Being an ‘out’ lesbian, I had to ask myself why was I not representing my own community within my own work,” Opie says. “So I decided to leave the world outside, stop traveling around and photographing Los Angeles. Instead, I started working in a studio,” stripping away any predisposed notions of “place” for this community. Opie created brightly colored, formal studio portraits that revealed her subjects’ attitudes, their dignity, their discomfort, their vulnerability and, most of all, their humanity. Included in this gender-bending series was a self-portrait that was selected to be in the Whitney’s ’95 Biennial. It showed Opie, wearing a leather hood on her head, with the word “pervert” cut into her chest.
Today, hanging prominently in her backyard studio is a more recent self-portrait: a radiant photograph of her lovingly nursing her baby, Oliver. She is annoyed when people invariably remember her for another self-portrait done in the early ’90s that has become iconic: a photograph of her back into which an artist friend had cut a drawing that Opie made of two female stick figures. “When people talk about my work, that’s the one they constantly go back to,” says Opie, who finds it difficult when people “pathologize” her because of this image. “How do I counter this? How do I create a larger discourse about the work? When I made that work, I wasn’t part of the international art community. I just wanted to make work,” she explains.
Opie has done that in spades, winning accolades as the first recipient of the Emerging Artist Award from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and Citibank Private Bank, as a Freund Fellow at Washington University and the St. Louis Art Museum in Missouri, an artist-in-residence at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and, last year, one of five winners of the Alpert Awards in the Arts, given to mid-career artists of various media sponsored by CalArts and the Herb Alpert Foundation. Her photographs have been shown worldwide, from the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Centre Georges Pompidour in Paris to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Although she travels extensively, she is also drawn to teaching and students. She has taught at Yale, Columbia, UC Irvine and Chapman College (now Chapman University). Since 2001, she has been part of UCLA’s preeminent Department of Art.
In her search for special places to photograph, Opie now plans to use any time she can squirrel away to travel to Chicago, Pittsburgh and Houston to complete her series on American cities. “What I love the most about photography is its relationship to the documentary, to reporting an idea of community in history,” says Opie. “That’s what I’m completely in love with.”
