Catherine Opie
Catherine Opie
Catherine Opieis an American fine-art photographer. She studies the relationships between mainstream and infrequent society, with a large emphasis on sexual identity, specializing in portraiture, studio, and landscape photography. Through photography Opie documents the connections between the individual and the space inhabited. She lives and works in West Adams, Los Angeles. She is well known for her work of portraits exploring the Los Angeles leather-dyke community. Opie is currently a professor of photography at University of California at Los Angeles...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionArtist
CountryUnited States of America
I like that time is marked by each sunrise and sunset whether or not you actually see it.
I'm a complete supporter of Obama and kind of in love with him.
I do photograph things for people to look at 100 years from now. But we're such a mediated society that things become historical the next day.
When we were kids, growing up in the sixties, the only images we had of ourselves were either still photographs or 8mm movies.... Now we have video, digital cameras, MP3s, and a million other ways to document ourselves. But the still photograph continues to hold a sense of mystery and awe to me.
...things become mainstream when they become imaged over and over again. Something happens in relationship to ideas of representation that makes it more palatable or digestible.
I'm very empathic to the construction of masculinity within our culture and how we build these identities up.
My dad was a very conservative Republican businessman, so obviously I considered it a problem when I realized I was a lesbian.
The reason I call myself a documentary photographer is the idea of how photographs contain and participate in history.
The biggest cliche in Photography is Sunrise and Sunset.
Nature is a dream state at this point, that we almost don't have a real relationship to it unless it's people living off the land and killing our own food and going for it.
I tried to get as far away from home as possible after I graduated from high school because I had a hard time being a kid.
I always give a print to everybody I photograph, and some of my subjects have told me they have a hard time hanging them up at home.
I really love to drive. It's really hard for me to be a passenger, even though I get to look around a little bit more, but I've gotten really good at driving and looking.
Language is a very complicated thing, and that's one of the reasons why I like making photographs.