Catherine Opie
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Catherine Opie (born 1961) is an American artist specializing in the photography of transgendered people. Most recently, she has turned to photographing architectural spaces (skyways and urban spaces) as well as landscapes (icehouses and surfers in the ocean). She is currently a professor of Photography at University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Her works are displayed in museums in Los Angeles, Chicago, and London. A book of her photography is entitled Skyways and Icehouses (ISBN 0-935640-72-X).
Features of her oeuvre include auto-mutilated self-portraits, portraits of performance artist Ron Athey and portraits of GLBTQ couples reminiscent of Renaissance Flemish painting. To execute some of these portraits, she utilized a polaroid camera as large as a room, producing one-of-a-kind polaroids that measure from 10 to 12 feet.
She has recently moved away from portraiture and turned to cityscapes, oceanscapes and rural or remote landscapes. She now photographs surfers along the California coast. Her work in this subject area was featured in the 2004 Whitney Biennial.
She obtained a Master's degree from California Institute of the Arts School of Art in 1988. Opie was born in Sandusky, Ohio, and currently lives in Los Angeles and New York.
