Customer Reviews

Catherine Opie: American Photographer

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Catherine Opie 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 her work at the Guggenheim in New York 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 among some photographers and curators 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

I have to admit that I had not heard of this photographer until recently. However, now that I have this book in my hands, I have to say that I understand why Opie is so highly regarded. While it may be true that this book is a collection of many different projects, the quality of the work is readily apparent. I was so impressed with Opie's work that I ordered her Chicago book. I might add that I also like the size of the book, not too big but not too little either--just right for my bookshelf.

I can't say I'm deeply impressed with Opie's pictures. She seems like a young artist who has not found her style yet. Much of the work seems derivative. Each small series seems to copy the style of a different photographer. For example:

* "Large Format Polaroids" = Robert Maplethorpe
* "Mini-malls" = Walker Evans
* "Domestic" = Tina Barney
* "1999" = William Christenberry
* "Surfers" = Rineke Dijkstra

Where is her own voice?

For another thing her work seems to be all over the place. She does color as well as black-and-white. She does landscapes, cityscape and portraits. She has miniature panoramas (some of her most interesting work) and lot of large format work. The list goes on-and-on: Self-portraits, studio portraits, night shots and family pictures (with some very cute pictures of her son).

Since she is part of the lesbian S/M community, there are a lot of portraits of her gay friends as well as some self-mutilation pictures (cutting). These are all done in a very formal way that I did not find as visually rich as similar work done by Robert Maplethorpe.

Despite these complaints I have to admit that I enjoyed looking at many of the pictures and will be interested to see how her career progresses.

This book is an exhibit catalog for Opie's show that just finished at the Guggenheim in New York. If you go to the Guggenheim website and look under past exhibits there are some great online pictures

The book is absolutely wonderful and I wish I could go to NY to see the show. The book contains photos, however, that are not in the show and so that makes it special. Catherine Opie is a wonderful photographer with a unique eye. This thorough retrospective covers her career up to date, nearly. Within her ongoing themes, such as community, there is much diversity of subject matter, so the variety keeps the viewer intrigued. Essays by the curator and writer Dorothy Allison and Interviews are included. My favorites are those interviews by Russel Ferguson. He seems quite perceptive and knowledgeable, as well as a warm interviewer, thus eliciting a satisfying set of interviews. I also appreciate the bibliography.

There was a problem with packaging the book for delivery, and it got bruised somewhat. The box was trashed. There was inadequate packing underneath the book (inflated plastic is also not environmentally friendly, either) and none above. The empty space of course got completely squashed. There was also only minimal tape used, definitely not according to the rules of the USPS! Of course, as anybody knows, boxes get stacked and thrown around and Amazon needs to prepare for that. I suggest stiff balled-up paper and/or excelsior, and the box filled with packing matls. This is not a cheap novel we are dealing with here, but something people will want to look nice for many years.