Catherine Opie
Catherine Opie
Catherine Opieis an American fine-art photographer. She studies the relationships between mainstream and infrequent society, with a large emphasis on sexual identity, specializing in portraiture, studio, and landscape photography. Through photography Opie documents the connections between the individual and the space inhabited. She lives and works in West Adams, Los Angeles. She is well known for her work of portraits exploring the Los Angeles leather-dyke community. Opie is currently a professor of photography at University of California at Los Angeles...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionArtist
CountryUnited States of America
Catherine Opie quotes about
The reason I call myself a documentary photographer is the idea of how photographs contain and participate in history.
The biggest cliche in Photography is Sunrise and Sunset.
I like that time is marked by each sunrise and sunset whether or not you actually see it.
I want to seduce my viewers and be able to hold them with the work. Much of that is done in terms of formalist ideas that I bring to the work.
I'm very interested in the language of photography in relationship to painting.
One of the greatest things about being an artist is, as you get older, if you keep working hard in relationship to what you want the world to be and how you want it to become, there is a history of interesting growth that resonates with different moments in your life.
I go back and forth, but I never wanted to be the photographer of the gay and lesbian community. I will wave a rainbow flag proudly, but I am not a singular identity. I think a singular identity isn't very interesting, and I'm a little bit more multifaceted as a person than that.