Catherine Opie Analysis.

Catherine Opie is a contemporary photographer from Ohio, USA, who is most known for her work as a portraiture photographer, whilst also finding an interest in depicting topics based around the LGBTQ+ community and more controversial issues within the society around her.  Catherine Opie often take her photographs within an internal studio space, usually with a brightly coloured background, of people from the LGBTQ+ community focusing on how they wish to portray themselves to the camera as well as within their everyday life and the people around them. I decided to focus my research on the work of Catherine Opie, mainly on her projects titled ‘Being and Having’ made in 1991 and ‘Portraits’ made between 1993-1997, both of which focus on the portrayal of the queer and LGBTQ+ community in Los Angeles and San Francisco. I decided to focus on these series of photographs for my research as I intend to create a series of photographs based on myself and my journey and transition as a Transgender, Bisexual male. By researching and analysing the work of this artist for my final major project, I hope to be able to create a series of photographic works based on the theme of gender identity, the LGBTQ+ community based on the theme of portraiture, self-portraiture, and documentary photography.

Many of the photographs created by Catherine Opie keep the focus solely on the sitter within the studio space to fully keep the focus of her target audience on the chosen sitter. Within this series of photographs Catherine Opie takes photographs of their chosen sitter in front of a coloured background to depict their gender identity, sexuality, and expression, allowing the sitters to pose themselves freely within the space, however they feel comfortable. By doing this I feel Catherine Opie is able to not only create a series of very candid imagery, but also create a story and document a wide and varied range of different people with their own struggles with gender, identity and the fluidity of the ways that they present themselves, both in their private lives and publicly around other people and the photographer.

As a lot of the photographs created by Catherine Opie are staged within a studio setting a lot of the lighting, she uses is mostly artificial, and often times the photographs minimally edited so no attention is drawn away from the sitter/sitters within her photographs. Similar to the work of Del LaGrace Volcano whose work I will also be looking at and researching for my final major project, Catherine Opie’s work is focused on documenting the lives and identities of other queer, transgender, and gender nonconforming people in front of a plain, but brightly, coloured background within a studio space. I feel that by creating her series of photographs in this way it allows Catherine Opie and her chosen sitter/sitters to document and portray their gender, sexuality and/or identity.

Whilst looking at and researching the work of Catherine Opie I have noticed that she uses a minimal colour scheme within her work as well as her use of lighting and the backdrops used within the studio space that she is taking the photographs in which I find almost inspirational towards my own ideas relating to the themes of portraiture, more specifically self-portraiture, photography and transitions and change and how I intend for my own photographs for my final major project to look. I feel that the use of colour is a big influence on the mood and atmosphere of a piece of photographic work, especially my own, so looking at the use of colour and monochromatic tones used by Catherine Opie and how she uses the colours to highlight and emphasize the sitter’s placement within the studio space, drawing the attention directly to them by making them stand out from the background sometimes through complimentary colour schemes. Her use of colour is something that I may potentially look at further for inspiration whilst creating my own work.

For my outcome relating to this artist research, I will be creating my own series of self-portraiture photographs based on the theme of the LGBTQ+ community, more specifically my own struggle and transition as a Transgender, Bisexual male. Since I will be focusing my work on self-portraiture, I intend to take photographs of myself within my own home to document my own transitional process and the change I have gone through and continue to go through and the struggles I have and face with gender identity, dysphoria and how I am seen both socially by others and by myself. I hope that by creating my final major project based on this topic and the themes I could spread more awareness with my target audience about the lives of transgender, non-binary and gender nonconforming people.