Art

Photo opportunity

Three museum shows make up a primer on the rise of the camera as a serious artistic tool.

By Howard Halle

Untitled #40 (Freeways)

The show
“Catherine Opie: American Photographer”
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Sept 26–Jan 7

THE BACKGROUND
Although Catherine Opie (born 1961) emerged onto the scene in the early 1990s, she has been taking photographs since she was nine years old. It was then, she explains, that she fell in love with the work of Lewis Hines, whose Depression-era images of construction workers at the Empire State Building are national icons. Hines’s photography is both art and social document, and in this respect, Opie’s childhood interest in him is telling.

THE TALENT
Opie has been something of a shape-shifter, producing portraiture and landscapes in color and black and white, large format and small. Her subjects have included transgender people, surfers, Wall Streeters, strip malls, freeways, Alaskan wilderness—and herself. “I’m an out lesbian,” she says, “and I have a family. So even though the work is definitely centered around how we think about photographic genres—portraiture, landscape, street photography—and even though I play with that language, it goes back and forth to focusing on myself in terms of queer identity.”

THE SIGNIFICANCE
“Very rarely is my work just purely about visual beauty,” Opie explains. “It’s a bigger exploration of ideas and community, and how we construct our world around us.” Opie’s images of her friends, for example, aren’t as casual as Nan Goldin’s. And while her work is rigorously formal, it’s not as straitjacketed as Robert Mapplethorpe’s could be. Opie’s work can seem almost classical at times, dealing with history as a recording of events, and as a series of categories—as well as stereotypes she’d like to explode.

NEXT SHOW: “New York, N. Why?: Photographs by Rudy Burckhardt, 1937–1940,” »

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