CATHERINE OPIE | Rachel

Courtesy of the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Fine-art photographer, Catherine Opie, was born in Sandusky, Ohio in 1961. She first came into contact with the work of child labor law reformer, Lewis Hine, when she was eight years old. Lewis Hine’s commitment to similar goals inspired her to become her own artist. Opie’s approach to photography is both conceptual and documentary. Her oeuvre is itself a sketch of life in America. It investigates the intersection of identity and relationships, with oneself and others, and the way these experiences manifest within communities, both fleeting and enduring. Opie expresses herself in portraiture, landscape and studio photography through compositions that depict powerful subjects, arranged so as to challenge powerful social constructs. Her series validates alternative identities, specifically queer identities, echoing her own biography. Ultimately, she looks to dismantle the judgmental reflex, the rush to stereotype an entire community without first understanding the identities of which it is composed. She completed her B.F.A. at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1985 and her M.F.A. at the California Institute of the Arts in 1988. She has since won numerous awards, including the President’s Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Women’s Caucus for Art (2009); United States Artists Fellowship (2006); Larry Aldrich Award (2004); and the CalArts Alpert Award in the Arts (2003). Her work has been exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (2011); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2010); The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2008); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2006); and Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2002). After briefly teaching at Yale University, she moved in 2001 to The University of California, Los Angeles, where she is Professor of Photography to this day.

Catherine Opie currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.