Museum Exhibition Catalogues, Monographs, Artist's Projects, Curatorial Writings and Essays
"I was trying to position myself within the complex idea of identity. I think I was using the camera in the street to try and figure out aspects of a community where I could potentially fit in, but I was also acknowledging that it was important to make images that were of our time. Photography always exists for me as a historical document." Catherine Opie, excerpted from her interview with Helen Molesworth in Empty and Full.
Published by Regen Projects. Foreword by Shaun Caley Regen. Text by Karen Tongson, Grant Johnson.
This publication presents more than 60 never-before-seen photographs by Catherine Opie (born 1961), drawn from over 30 years of making pictures in and of Los Angeles. Illustrated by more than 100 color and black-and-white images, Harmony Is Fraught sheds new light on a variety of subjects familiar to Opie’s expansive oeuvre. It includes intimate portraits of lovers and friends, documentary-style photographs of iconic and lesser-known landmarks, unprecedented experiments in self-portraiture, and scenes of queer life from the 1990s to the present. In “Catherine Opie’s Multiverse,” a new catalog essay penned in response to the exhibition, Karen Tongson considers the analogical relationship between the timelessness of Opie’s photographs and the city of Los Angeles itself, with its “jarring juxtapositions between 1920s Spanish balconies, mid-century dingbats, aspirational tudors and cloverleaf on-ramps to the future.”
Published by Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand/KMEC Books. Edited by Adriano Pedrosa, Guilherme Giufrida. Text by Ashton Cooper, David Joselit, Guilherme Giufrida, Jack Halberstam, Vi Grunvald.
A leading voice in contemporary photography, Catherine Opie has been known for her portraits of the queer scene in California since the late 1980s. A fundamental element of Opie’s work is the observation of different gender performances through a critical revision of the genre of portraiture. Her photography emphasizes how portraiture has the power to both reinforce and deconstruct conventional and binary expressions of gender. The title of this publication and the MASP exhibition it accompanies is based on the double meaning of the word gênero in Portuguese, meaning both “gender” and “genre.” For her first solo show in Brazil, Opie enters into dialogue with the tradition of the portrait—a way of representing the human figure that dates to the 15th century in the West—producing an archive of diverse presentations of gender and sexuality. Around 60 photographs from her most iconic series are displayed alongside a selection of around 15 emblematic portraits from MASP’s collection. Strongly marked by figuration and the formal constraint of portraiture, the juxtaposition of these works accentuates the dialogues, tensions and reformulations that Opie’s photographic oeuvre proposes. Catherine Opie was born in Ohio in 1961 and is currently a professor of photography and the chair of the art department at UCLA. Opie’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe and Japan. She has had solo exhibitions of her work at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; St. Louis Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among many others.
Published by Walther König, Köln. Edited with text by Ana María Bresciani, Tone Hansen. Text by Natalie Hope O’Donnell, Russell Ferguson.
The work of the celebrated Los Angeles–based photographer Catherine Opie (born 1961) includes portraits of gay and lesbian subjects and American urban landscapes, ranging from large-scale color works to small black-and-white prints. A full survey of her works from the early 1990s to the present, Keeping an Eye on the World is published for Opie's first European retrospective, at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Norway. Limited quantity available.
Published by Hatje Cantz. Edited by Helen Molesworth. Text by Jill Medvedow, Anna Stothart.
Catherine Opie (born 1961) has forged new idioms in both portrait and landscape photography, frequently combining the two genres to explore how people occupy different landscapes--from high school football players on the field to ice fishermen on frozen lakes, to surfers waiting for the next wave. In doing so she has come to stand as one of America's foremost documentarians. Recently, Opie has returned to the genre of street photography, elaborating on the relationship between people and place, particularly the energies and desires created when masses of people convene around a shared interest or value. Freedom of assembly is one of the rights Americans take for granted; Opie is interested in the way that sites, such as the National Mall in Washington, D.C., come to be defined by the groups of people who assemble there and how their gathering shapes the identity of the place. This catalogue presents Opie's photographs of recent political demonstrations and gatherings, ranging from the inauguration of President Obama to Tea Party rallies. Drawing on a long and august tradition of American landscape painting and documentary photography, Opie gives us a view of democracy in action. Her photographs offer a dynamic, complicated and loving portrait of the United States at the dawn of the twenty-first century. This fully illustrated catalogue features a discussion between the artist and ICA Boston Chief Curator Helen Molesworth.
Published by Gregory R. Miller & Co.. Foreword by Deborah Willis. Text by Eileen Myles.
Celebrated photographer Catherine Opie (born 1961) has long documented the faces and landscapes of American communities, both inside and outside the mainstream. The subjects of her highly regarded portraits have ranged from California surfers, friends and fixtures in LGBT communities, high school football players and the artist herself. In this series of photographs documenting the inauguration of President Barack Obama, Opie broadens her focus to an expanded community of Americans: on January 20, 2009, over one million people gathered on the national mall to see the swearing in of America's first black president, united by their pride at what had been accomplished and a collective hope for the future. In the tradition of Robert Frank's photographs of the 1956 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and William Eggleston's 1976 Election Eve series, Opie's Inauguration, a series of 100 photographs, offers an intimate political and personal view of one of the most public days of a nation. Accompanying texts by author, curator and photo-historian Deborah Willis and writer Eileen Myles address the significance of Opie's achievement with this body of work and further explore the wonder, elation and the self-conscious anticipations of this historic moment.
Published by Guggenheim Museum Publications. Text by Dorothy Allison, Jennifer Blessing, Russell Ferguson, Nat Trotman.
This comprehensive new exhibition catalogue, published to accompany the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's major mid-career survey of Catherine Opie's work, is the first to gather all of the artist's key projects to date in a single volume. Opie is best known for her subtle but potent portraits of people from the queer communities of Los Angeles and San Francisco. In this definitive volume, each of Opie's series--among them Portraits, Freeways, Domestic, Icehouses and In and Around Home--is reproduced in full color plates alongside works that were not displayed in the exhibition, allowing for the most complete overview of this important Los Angeles artist's work to date. In addition, this volume features a lead essay by exhibition curator Jennifer Blessing, which surveys Opie's artistic career and its historical contexts; a series of interviews with the artist by Russell Ferguson, Chair of the Department of Art at UCLA; and a brief personal reflection by internationally renowned novelist Dorothy Allison, whose work explores many concerns similar to Opie's. It also includes introductory essays on each of the artist's series by Nat Trotman, Assistant Curator at the Guggenheim, as well as a newly researched, exhaustive exhibition history and bibliography, making it the primary source for future research on Opie's work. Catherine Opie was born in Ohio in 1961 and is currently Professor of Photography at UCLA. Opie's work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe and Japan. She has had solo exhibitions of her work at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; St. Louis Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among many others.
Published by Walker Art Center. Introduction by Douglas Fogle.
Since the late 1980s, Catherine Opie's interest in the motif of the visual road trip has resulted in photographs that sumultaneously document and question the self-constructed identities of the people and places that characterize America. From the freeways of Los Angeles to the downtown of St. Louis and the Wall Street district of New York, Opie now turns her camera to the skyways and icehouses of the Twin Cities. The culmination of a year-long commission from the Walker Art Center, Skyways and Icehouses provides a meditative portrait of a locale, at once a straight-forward documentation and an inquiring social psycho-geography, an exploration of those symbolic architectures often taken for granted. Personal anecdotes, memories, and stories fron Minnesota residents animate Opie's haunting landscapes.
PUBLISHER Walker Art Center
BOOK FORMAT Paperback, 9.5 x 12 in. / 56 pgs / 9 color
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 6/2/2002 No longer our product
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2002
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780935640724TRADE List Price: $24.95 CAD $27.50
Catherine Opie: Genre / Gender / Portraiture
Catherine Opie: Keeping an Eye on the World
Catherine Opie: Empty and Full
Catherine Opie: Inauguration
Catherine Opie: American Photographer
Catherine Opie: Skyways And Icehouses