Catherine Opie
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By choosing distinctive aspects of each city and treating them in accordance with self-imposed restrictions, Opie demonstrates the strength and durability of documentary photography. For the Chicago series, she focuses on the way the city is lit, the buildings by streetlamps and window lights while the lake scenes are naturally illuminated, with no visible light sources–no sunrises or sunsets. The restraint and classicism of her technically rigorous, compositionally balanced, uniformly sized images are a surprising contrast with some of her earlier work: in a 1994 self-portrait, Opie appears nude with the word pervert carved into her chest. At about that time, she says in an interview in Artkrush, “I realized I was becoming the poster child for out, leather dyke-art, and I just wasn’t interested in that.” So she returned to architectural photography. She’s alternated for years between pictures of people and pictures of places, but she considers all of them “portraits,” and all are shot under tight constraints. For the Chicago images, she used a specially constructed camera well suited to landscapes and to architecture in context rather than individual buildings.
The recent Wolfgang Tillmans exhibit at the MCA (which closed August 13) provides an interesting contrast to Opie’s work, as does the MCA’s recently closed tribute to Robert Heinecken. Where Tillmans reinvents the photo exhibit by hanging an unrestricted spectrum of images, Opie selects one corner of the world and stalks it judiciously. But neither is much interested in the anything-goes possibilities of digital photography, and both are drawn to projects notable for their seriousness and large scope. Heinecken represents another possibility: his magazine-page palimpsests, created in the late 60s, reveal the strangeness of contemporary culture. In contrast to Tillmans’s postmodern multiplicity and Heinecken’s witty surrealism, Opie’s classicism appears to be the product of a stable, coherent personality and a rigorously trained eye, following a tradition of picture making that stretches back almost a millennium. Even her photographs of androgynous tattooed and pierced young people, which opened at the MCA in late 2000, are deeply humanistic, with the kind of gravity that results from simple compositions.
WHEN Through 10/18
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Regen Projects, Los Angeles.
