What to Do When the World’s on Fire: A Conversation with Catherine Opie

I’ve always been somebody who watches. Initially, I got into photography because I wrote a book report about Lewis Hine. I wrote about his photograph of a child laborer at Carolina Mills. I was supposed to be writing about child labor laws, but instead I decided to really look at the image and talk about what it meant for changing laws.

That photograph had a profound effect on me, and I basically told my parents that I wanted to be a social documentary photographer and make images. I didn’t really know what that was—I probably didn’t even say social documentary at that point—but I told them I wanted to make images, so they supported that. I got my first camera on my ninth birthday and one of my first images was a self-portrait with me making muscles. I definitely looked like a little baby dyke in that image in front of my house in Sandusky, Ohio. And that’s how it all started.

When I started making work, I had just graduated from CalArts. I wanted to make things that felt timeless and that were steeped within this moment of being with the person within their body, within the space, within the photograph. Being and Having was a breakthrough moment for me. It’s 13 photographs of friends who are lesbians or are lesbian-identified, queer-identified as well at that point. It was the first time that allowed me to think about a studio space versus bearing witness out in the world, and I think that shift was so important to what the conversation was around documentary photography. I wanted to make a different kind of portrait that was more about performing identity than it was necessarily about purely representation. So in the photographs, each person has a fake mustache that they went and bought at the Hollywood Wig Store. I gave them $15 for the mustache, and then they came to my living room and they would sit for the photo. I decided to frame it really tight around the head, and the advantage of a 4×5 camera is that you see every single detail.

Being and Having first showed in Santa Barbara. The woman who was working behind the front desk said, “Hey, I’ve been looking at these a lot and I think I know some of these guys in these portraits.” You’re using a 4×5 camera, where every freckle, every pore, every webbing is shown, but you still end up reading them completely as male, because people aren’t used to women looking back at the camera. Think about it, look through photo history and think about what women look at the camera and who’s the photographer and what women are looking off. That’s a big thing that happens in photography, and so the power of the gaze is really important in relationship to feminism. And so the idea of performing masculinity versus having to be a man was really powerful within our community.

These came out of a time in which we were performing gender in our club lives. So we would don our mustaches and we’d go out on our motorcycles to the one and only seven-days-a-week lesbian bar in LA called the Palms, and we would offer women rides home. I don’t think anybody ever took me up on it, but we were performing masculinity. What is it about being called sir? I have been called sir every single day of my life. It used to drive my mother crazy because I stopped wearing dresses at a certain point and everybody just thought I was always a little boy. And so Being and Having is also so deeply tied with ideas of our own personal identity. It also allowed me to use my sense of humor differently within my work, because often my humor doesn’t come out through the work, but I actually think that I’m funny.

At that time, I wasn’t a known artist, so for my friends in the photos, it was just like, “Oh, Cathy’s part of the community and she’s taking these pictures.” Even though they saw that I had strobes and lights and I was fairly serious, never was it in their minds that these would ever end up in museums, just as it wasn’t in my thinking as well.

So it’s been interesting to watch them, at first, wonder about their portraits and whether or not they wanted to even live with their images. A few friends were like, “Wow, that’s really an intense picture of me.” They have gone on this journey with me. And to end up being part of a larger discourse and culture, as a community, I think has been exciting for a lot of my friends, or I hope so.

We all, as human beings, long for stories. We really want to understand each other, even though at times we can’t and we get frozen. But I think our stories and our experiences, our relationship as readers of fiction or images, are all tied to us wanting to understand what our place is in the world. So storytelling to me also is absolutely in line with ideas of representation and visibility.

Dyke is a portrait about identity that’s worn on the body. What you’ll see is my friend Steakhouse, who’s a filmmaker. She had “dyke” tattooed on the back of her neck in 1992. And I thought it was one of the bravest acts that I had seen. In terms of scarification and piercing and everything that was being done within my community, dyke was just, wow. I couldn’t believe Steak did that. This is the first time that I chose a fabric background, and that was definitely in relationship to “old master” setups. I grew up with portraits in my home that were painted by John Opie, who was part of the Royal Academy in England. My dad took me to a lot of museums in Ohio when I was a kid. Both Toledo and Cleveland have unbelievable collections, especially of portraits. So I had the “old masters” in mind, always. Those “old master” portraits of the royals were also supposed to describe what the royals did and included all these artifacts. But the artifact is worn on the body here, not within the ephemera that’s surrounding the portrait. Dyke is the subject. Dyke is the title.

It plays on two kind of axes, so to speak, around identity and how we look at art. The figure has their back to us with the old English script of “dyke,” and you can see other tattoos. You can see space in between the elbows and then the awkward little elbows that are balanced at the bottom of the image. The other aspect I think that is really important is that the female body is presented in this only in relationship to the language on the body, not as a female body. The formality of that in the history of art and how women are posed, this is definitely in conversation, in opposition, in everything, but using those tropes of lighting and so forth to almost make it a very painterly portrait.

Steak and I are still friends. Steak is a really amazing queer filmmaker, so produces crazy queer films under the name Steakhouse. I see Steak every once in a while, but the community’s just dispersed and we’re all so in our own lives, which is different than being in your twenties and thirties.