Opie against the Grain

Two photographs. In the first, a pair of old, white brick walls converge at the center of the frame. Against their corner is a dry lawn, a narrow stretch of grass. Weeds grow across the bricks, their webbing stretched over what resembles a forlorn cannon. The long, narrow image follows the walls to their apex, where security cameras perch, peering at a road just out of view. They look like ancient ruins, a fortress from a forgotten war. The second photograph features the infrastructure of a portrait studio: Two ornately dressed figures, each wearing versions of papal garments, sit on top of scaffolding pilons. The frontmost figure wears a tufted, Victorian-era yellow dress and a pope’s miter. The photograph’s title names this figure Darryl; Darryl extends long, white acrylic nails toward the camera, face draped in piercings and jewelry. Lush red curtains hang as a backdrop, shrouding the second figure in a maroon glow.

At first glance, the images look like the work of two separate artists. The first resembles the work of photographers like Bernd and Hilla Becher, who systematically documented vernacular housing and infrastructure in postwar Germany. The second belongs to an altogether separate lineage: Its emphasis on performativity, gender, and race—Darryl is Black and wears a curly white wig reminiscent of those worn by early American legislators—would suggest photographs by Cindy Sherman or even Claude Cahun, both of whom have emphasized the artificiality of identity, particularly gender, by manipulating photography’s reputation for objectivity and authenticity.

In fact, both photographs—Untitled #9 (Walls) (2023) and Lamb of God/Darryl and Pig Pen, 1996 (1996)—are by Catherine Opie. The images were displayed simultaneously at two solo exhibitions this past winter, a bicoastal foray that jointly comprised what could be considered a retrospective of the artist’s wide-ranging work. At Regen Projects in Los Angeles, Opie presented a collection of never-before-seen works from the nineties and early aughts. Especially prominent were Opie’s photographs of queer subcultures across the United States, with a particular focus on the San Francisco LGBTQ kink community and the LA lesbian club scene. Meanwhile, at Lehmann Maupin’s New York City gallery, Opie displayed a series of recent works taken primarily in Vatican City during Covid-19 lockdowns in 2021, when she was a Robert Mapplethorpe Fellow in Photography at the American Academy of Rome. There she documented the worn façades and windows of an empty Vatican City.

Taken together, the two shows reveal the more conventional facets of a body of work long deemed radical. Entrenched aesthetic principles bridge the gap between Opie’s portraits of queer subcultures and her interest in overlooked, banal infrastructure. Opie’s early portraiture aimed to elevate oppressed groups through the formal framing and cultural signifiers of Renaissance painting and documentary photography, tracing a humanist lineage that aims to dignify individuals on the basis of universal personhood. Meanwhile, her recent depictions of Vatican City extend her explorations of the built environment, but key deviations in her approach to this subject matter reveal the limits of Opie’s politics of representation. In New York and LA, Opie’s explorations of communities and architectures always “fit,” if painfully, into established notions of the family, the city, the state, and art history.

Opie is undoubtedly a juggernaut of American photography and of queer visual culture more broadly; her impact on a generation of artists and scholars cannot be overstated. Opie remains largely insulated from critique, perhaps due to the relative dearth of photographers working successfully in the art market or by the baffling range of her subject matter, which frequently flummoxes critics but fails to prompt much further discourse. Now, as corporate and institutional affirmations of representation, diversity, and inclusion ring increasingly hollow, Opie’s work feels newly and unexpectedly orthodox.

Opie first garnered attention for her portraiture in the early 1990s. Her 1994 solo exhibition at Regen Projects, entitled Portraits, featured a suite of colorful photographs, each of a single sitter. Angela Scheirl (1993) displays Opie’s friend, a transgender performing artist, on an ornate, black, wrought-iron chair set against a brilliant red backdrop. (An earlier, black-and-white portrait of Scheirl appears in the recent Regen Projects exhibition alongside other works from the Portraits series.) Scheirl, clothed in a navy suit, red tie, and black derbies, sits in the center of the frame with his shoulders turned in a riff of a traditional three-quarter stance, staring at the lens straight on. The sitter’s direct gaze, assertive posture, and internally harmonious color scheme—Scheirl’s tie matches the background, as do the maroon paisley designs of his shirt—conveys what scholar Dana Seitler calls a “figuration of self-possession … that deliberately resonates with the techniques of Renaissance portraiture.”

Opie’s compositional decisions foreground the respectability of her sitters, portraying marginalized, nonnormative subjects in an idiom indebted to Renaissance court portraiture. Seitler compares Opie’s formal choices in portraiture with those of painters like Hans Holbein the Younger, whom Opie frequently cites as a direct influence. In Lamb of God/Darryl and Pig Pen, Pig Pen appears in an ostentatious Tudor-era costume reminiscent of the gown and headdress worn in Holbein’s portrait of Lady Guildford, an early 1540s copy of which hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In other portraits, subjects like Scheirl appear in tailored menswear. These gender-bending portraits use a visual language of prestige— elaborate backdrops, costuming, the formal posing and framing of the sitter—to dignify their subjects. Marginalized communities seek—and gain—legitimization and respect through timeworn visual codes.

At Regen Projects, landscape photographs of LA freeways appeared alongside Opie’s early portraiture. Taken in the early morning on her commute to the University of California, Irvine, the photographs make the freeways appear empty and almost abstract, the intersecting roads crisscrossing the picture plane. The images are black and white and printed on long, horizontal paper. Opie emphasizes the dramatic curves and height of freeways through contrast and shadow around each of the interchange’s levels, a technique that replicates Ansel Adams’s dramatic approach to Yosemite’s peaks and valleys. These photographs draw on the iconography of landscape painting and photography to ennoble aspects of our contemporary world, but their results often valorize dysfunctional urban infrastructure in the present. Opie’s empty photographs belie the reality of atomized, traffic-filled commutes, picturing instead bare vistas that feel pulled from an architecture firm’s brochure.

Opie’s urban landscapes encourage spectators to imagine themselves into each empty terrain, an ideal plane where viewers may freely envision new ways of sharing space. Her 2002 book, Skyways and Icehouses, makes this presumption literal. The volume features photographs of the transparent skyways that lace between buildings in downtown Minneapolis. Short texts from the city’s inhabitants precede the images, the residents recounting their experiences with the skyways. “Once through the skyway maze, we are individuals again,” writes Lisa Ferguson in one of these passages. “But at least a few times during the workday we participate in the cultural connector.… In the skyway, we are in community.” Visually, the interstitial walkways parallel the earlier Freeways series in a new environment: Opie focuses on an overlooked aspect of transportation infrastructure, crystallized into its perfect architectural form.

Much of Opie’s work dignifies overlooked or outcasted subjects through representation, aligning freeways and pierced faces with valorized portraits and landscapes of the past. “I think it’s important to create social change,” Opie said in a 2020 interview with ArtReview, if only in the symbolic realm of representation (where “one’s own community can recognize themselves within the work later on”). Opie’s project encourages social uplift by spurring viewers to identify with—or within—the people and places in her photographs, a line of thinking commensurate with liberal humanist principles. According to this ideology, when an individual freely recognizes the essential human value of another person, society can cohere on a foundation of individual freedom and secular rationality. Opie offers microcosms of this process of identification throughout her work: Empty landscapes and portraits of the queer community engender aesthetic experiences that allow viewers to “see” themselves—and their history—in the artwork.

It’s no surprise, then, that Opie should turn to Holbein as a touchstone. The old master painter participated in the European humanist community, producing portraits of prominent members like philosopher and statesman Thomas More. Through naturalistic portraiture, Holbein sought to further the humanist project by representing the unique individuality of each sitter: His nineteenth-century biographer Alfred Woltmann praised Holbein’s portraits for their “breadth and depth of inner life.” Holbein offers an early example of aesthetic beliefs that prize accurate representations of individuality over judgments of beauty or ugliness. At the time—and perhaps now—the former presented an opportunity for the artist to participate in a larger project of democratic social change, while the latter instrumentalized the artist as a pawn of the dogmatic Roman Catholic Church.

In the twentieth century, documentary photography emerged as a crucial tool in promoting similar values. In addition to Holbein, Opie has compared her work with that of August Sander, a German documentary photographer known for his portraits of individuals from a range of social positions in Weimar Germany. Sander’s work, divided into subsets like “The Skilled Tradesmen” or “The Farmer,” formed a larger collection called People of the Twentieth Century. His black-and-white portraits employ the formal elements of traditional portraiture, featuring sitters positioned frontally and symmetrically. Sander aimed to capture the totality of humankind through the representation of individual subjects—a project that he believed would have “the power to fix the world.” Sander’s beliefs were made possible by earlier humanists like Holbein, and they rest on a set of assumptions: that the accurate representation of outward appearance is an accurate expression of an inner self, that any individual can speak to a universal condition, and that identification between the viewer and the represented subject can prompt social reform.

Once radical in their challenge to religious and monarchical power, the assumptions undergirding the liberal humanist tradition—and its artwork—now feel entrenched and flawed. “No longer can talk of inclusion, representation, or a neutral public sphere pass for something like equality,” writes theorist Nicholas Gamso in the opening sentences of Art after Liberalism (Columbia University Press, 2021). Gamso’s voice joins a chorus of scholars critiquing liberal media’s fixation on representation as a tool for social improvement. In the art world, for example, the work of now embattled artist Kehinde Wiley, known for his portrayals of contemporary Black subjects in the style of European court paintings, has recently been the object of critique. “[Wiley’s work] has come to exemplify how merely placing a Black person in a position of power is not enough to change the racist status quo,” wrote critic Harley Wong in Art in America last summer. “He may play with systems of power, but he does not shatter them.” Similar questions haunt Opie’s oeuvre, indicative of a growing rift between demands for inclusive representation and those for systemic change.

Away from sunny, secular America, space for community and identification appears to be sorely lacking. Opie’s earlier architectural photographs revel in the horizontal, concrete forms of modernity, a preference thrown into relief by the closed, vertical compositions of her most recent series. Where her Freeways enjoyed a relational, libidinal freedom—the arcing networks of curved lines and cement slabs recall outstretched, entwined limbs—the walls and windows of Vatican City appear old and constrained. Untitled #16 (Windows) (2023) shows a segment of a window striated by wooden bars, its view immediately cut off by the façade of the facing brick building. Where glass in Opie’s Skyways series served as a transparent plane through which viewers could clearly imagine the ambulation of community, the glass here warps and doubles the image, showing a partial reflection of the adjacent room. Untitled #7 (Walls) (2023) features a vertical view of two brick walls meeting, abutted by a narrow, empty corner of dry grass. Instead of empty byways and thoroughfares, Opie represents Vatican City as a closed, densely built environment inaccessible to viewers or their imagination of communal identification.

Absent, too, are the references to the old masters of art history, ones Opie has usually taken pains to evoke. The cropped frame of Untitled #16 (Windows) is uneven; a view of the outside is off-center, and the slight slant of the windowpanes betrays the camera’s crooked position. These choices take on greater significance in No Apology June 5, 2021 (2023), a distant portrait that shows Pope Francis on his balcony delivering a speech that, in the words of the press release, “first acknowledged, but did not apologize for, the bodies of indigenous children found in unmarked graves in Canada.” Opie represents this omission by departing from the formal values of her art-historical rubric: The pope, shot from afar, is out of focus and emotionally illegible, and the image’s tones are left in a bland, beige register. A similar maneuver undergirds the series Blood Grids, in which close-ups of wounds from devotional Vatican frescoes crop out the bodies of Christ and his followers in order to emphasize the church’s violent past. Where Opie’s appropriations of Renaissance imagery previously explored more expansive interpretations of their original environments, her newest works avoid these techniques to advance a critique of papal authority. (I cannot help but think that, if given the chance to represent other papal controversies, like the pope’s recent use of a homophobic slur in a closed-door meeting, Opie would opt not to photograph these scenes at all.)

In the Vatican’s religious, hierarchical, and historically conservative domain, Opie forecloses identification with public space and its figures, divorcing her representations from canonical artistic precedent—and from the rest of her oeuvre. At Regen Projects, conversely, viewers are invited to associate the photograph’s subjects—and themselves—with emblems of wealth, status, and Western power (many of which were, ironically, deployed by the Catholic Church). The resulting exhibitions feel like echoes of an outdated politics, their easy targets failing to account either for the false promises of liberalism or the oppressive manifestations of secular Western democracy today. Of course, it may be unfair to ask all that of a couple of photography exhibitions—though it is the goal of Opie’s tradition to, in the words of August Sander, “honestly tell the truth about our age and our people.” In her latest work, she may finally reach this lineage’s high-water mark.