Catherine Opie: the court portrait, reassigned

Catherine Opie is the photographer who makes the studio and document argument stop being an argument. She takes the most authored possible approach to picture making and applies it to people she knows, which means neither half of the usual objection lands.

Everything here comes from published series, exhibitions and the documented facts of a teaching and museum career. She has been unusually willing to be a subject in her own work, and that is described as a set of pictorial decisions rather than as biography.

The format she chose, and why it is a provocation

The formal portrait against a rich ground was invented to confer standing. It was the visual technology of courts, guilds and merchant families: a sitter with money commissioned an image that would establish them as somebody, and the apparatus of drapery, frontality, scale and painstaking description existed to make the claim stick.

Opie took that apparatus and pointed it at people who had no access to it.

Being and Having, from 1991, is thirteen colour photographs of her friends, cropped close, against a flat yellow so intense the ground reads as an object in itself, several of the sitters wearing false facial hair. The Portraits made between 1993 and 1997 opened the frame out to figures against saturated fabric, sitters drawn from the queer and leather communities she was part of in Los Angeles. She has named Hans Holbein and August Sander as the references, which are an odd pair on purpose. Holbein describes an individual to the last hair. Sander sorted a nation into occupational types. Doing both at once is the whole formal joke, and it is not really a joke.

The important thing is that the format does not strain. Put a leather community in a Holbein and the picture does not read as a costume party or as an insult. It reads as a portrait, which is exactly the point being made, and the argument is carried by composition rather than by any caption.

She takes the same position she asks for

Two self-portraits from the early 1990s are the ones most often discussed, and they matter here for a structural reason rather than a shocking one.

In Self-Portrait/Cutting, from 1993, she turns her back to the camera. Cut into the skin between her shoulders is a child’s drawing: two stick figures in skirts holding hands beside a house with clouds above it. The image of domestic ordinariness is the thing that had to be carved. Self-Portrait/Pervert, from the following year, is frontal and seated, the head covered by a black leather hood, the arms pierced with regular rows of needles, a word cut in ornate script across the chest, against a patterned ground.

Both are made with the same lighting, the same grounds and the same formality as the portraits of everyone else. That is the decision worth noting. The photographer who is asking others to sit for a highly controlled picture puts herself through the identical procedure, and does not soften the treatment when the subject is her own body.

This is the practical answer to the question raised in the problem of the willing subject. A photograph cannot show that terms were agreed. What it can show is that the photographer is inside the same arrangement, on the same terms, in the same series, and that evidence accumulates across a body of work in a way no single frame can supply.

Compared with the studio she is quoting

Robert Mapplethorpe was doing something adjacent a decade earlier, and the difference is instructive rather than a matter of quality.

His plain grounds and classical lighting proposed that his subjects deserved the treatment marble gets. Hers propose that they deserve the treatment a Tudor chancellor got, which is a claim about social standing rather than about beauty. His subjects are frequently anonymous and frequently fragments. Hers are named, whole, seated, and looking out. Both use the studio to dignify. One does it by making the body a form and the other by making the sitter a person.

That is the axis the essay on the studio and the document is built around, and Opie sits at the point where it stops being a line and becomes a single position.

The rest of the record, which is wider than the reputation

The subject range is much broader than the early work suggests, and the breadth is part of the method. Domestic, made between 1995 and 1998, was a cross-country project photographing lesbian couples and households at home. Icehouses, from 2001, and Surfers, from 2003, are landscape and near-abstract sequences. She spent 2007 and 2008 on high school football players, and 2010 to 2011 photographing the interior of Elizabeth Taylor’s house without ever photographing Taylor.

The constant is not the subject matter. It is that she keeps choosing communities, entering them properly, and then treating them with a formality most photographers reserve for objects. The professional record around it is straightforward: teaching at UCLA from 2001, an endowed chair in 2019, a Guggenheim survey in 2008, work in the major American collections, and fellowships including one from the Guggenheim Foundation in 2019.

The reason the pictures still function is that they answer a question most photography of this subject avoids. Who is the arrangement for? In her case the answer is legible in the work itself, because the same arrangement was applied to the photographer, and the format used to make the claim was one that had been withheld from everybody in the frame.