PHOTO:Catherine Opie

Catherine Opie described herself in a 1994 Los Angeles Times article as “A kind of twisted social documentary photographer”. Long before earning her MFA at the California Institute of the Arts in 1988, she found that photography was perfectly suited to her drive to describe the world and people around her, a drive that unifies all her projects to date, whether focused on gender and sexual identities, notions of community, or the myth of the American dream.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Lehmann Maupin Gallery Archive

Working between conceptual and documentary approaches to image making, Catherine Opie examines familiar genres, portraiture, landscape, and studio photography, in surprising uses of serial images, unexpected compositions, and the pursuit of radically different subject matters in parallel. Many of her works capture the expression of individual identity through groups (couples, teams, crowds) and reveal an undercurrent of her own biography vis-à-vis her subjects. Whether documenting political movements, queer subcultures, or urban transformation, Opie’s images of contemporary life comprise a portrait of our time in America, which she often considers in relation to a discourse of opposition. Her work resonates with formal ideas that convey the importance of “The way things should look”, evidence of the influence of her early exposure to the history of art and painting. Her exhibition “Portraits and Landscapes”, encompasses recent formal portraits and abstract landscapes that are inspired by the genres of European portraiture and American landscape photography. Utilizing the classical technique of chiaroscuro, Opie’s subjects are posed in front of a black drop cloth and theatrically lit, intimately dramatizing the details of the face and body. She emphasizes their unique characteristics while also suggesting an allegorical dimension beyond their individual identity. Interspersed amongst these commanding portraits are abstract landscapes that defy any recognition of their geographical location. Capturing pinnacles of the American landscape, Opie reduces the images to blurred light and elementary abstract form to elicit visceral reactions that resonate with oblivion, the sublime, and the unknown. The resulting photographs transcend the ubiquity that typically surrounds depictions of these natural wonders reminiscent of the American Pictorialist style, which sought to not simply capture, but to create a unique photographic image.

Info: Lehmann Maupin Gallery, 536 West 22nd Street, New York, Duration: 14/1-20/2/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.lehmannmaupin.com