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“I have a friend, Daphne Fitzpatrick, who ended up teaching at Bard College because she [el fotógrafo] Stephen Shore had liked his Instagram. It’s strong, right? Stephen directs the Photography classes at that university and being so involved in his Instagram made him recognize an artist he wanted to hire. I have never entered Instagram in search of professors for the University of Los Angeles. Maybe I should open up my world a little more. “
The photographer Catherine Opie (Ohio, 60 years old), today sitting in her studio in Los Angeles behind sizable plastic glasses and at a safe distance from the Zoom angle, thus gets along with some aspects of modernity. His work, however, has never been more relevant. The images he took in the United States in the 1990s, especially of the community queer Of all colors, and very particularly the lesbian and sadomasochistic, have taken on a new significance in the era of identity discourse. The concerns that once earned her the nickname of the Great American Subversive – the tension between identity and community, the rejection of conformity, the distance between the dominant culture and the surrounding ones, the visibility of the marginalized – are now those of millions of people. persons. His vision, once provocative and disturbing, today receives adjectives such as urgent O necessary.
“They have not put me in that bag, I got myself into it. I made some pretty harsh images of myself, ”she admits with her affable professorial tone. Her most famous self-portrait, for example, is one from 1994 in which she appears seated in front of a golden brocade, her face covered by a leather mask and her naked torso, bleeding and marked by the word perverted. “I took it as part of a community [Opie es lesbiana] related to the AIDS epidemic. I wanted to be a frank artist about it. The fact that I did that work, I suppose, implies that I am comfortable waving the identity flag ”.
Do you feel that the new identity discourses fit in with your portraits? Mine is a visual conversation. If you look at history in the broad sense, throughout the world, each culture has had and has its own identity specificity; each country, its own relationship with the rigidity. But within it all there is a universal humanity. So what do we do as humans with our rigidity and specificity? What comes out of that relationship? One of the things that fascinates me the most about being an artist who works in the medium of photography is that your relevance is generated over the years. That your work is done in your era, but it has the potential to add to the discourse of the future.
Do you feel that photography should convey speech? My work is a diary of my thoughts. I have always used photography to communicate: if I were a writer, I would do it with novels, but I have had to do it with images. I already know that photography has changed since the nineties and that people use it in a more gestural way, whereas I am only interested in framing certain ideas and expressing them visually. But what I want is to express myself and do it in photographic series. In 2020, for example, I bought a van and hit the road, making a great road trip American, to photograph the monuments that have fallen and those that remain in this fight against racial inequality; to photograph the covid in the country and Trump in the country. I needed to make that trip to frame certain ideas that I had had about my three big themes: people, places, politics.
You could say that all his work is political. Yes, I don’t know, sometimes I need to rest. Do I think Minnesota’s surfers and ice warehouses are political? Perhaps the latter are more so now than ten years ago due to climate change. But for me they were ways of understanding the landscape, its people, nature, the temporal condition of every community. Whether or not that falls under the threshold of politics depends on how each viewer approaches it. I simply like to look at these works and let them become a space in which to meditate, where I feel my love for nature.
His work, now collected in a monograph by Phaidon, does not travel intact to the present. His exquisite formalism is striking, which in his day opened the doors of the American academic world but which is at the opposite of the current angry and crude image-denunciation. His portraits of American outcasts evoke classical poses and lights, especially Hans Holbein’s paintings of Henry VIII’s court.
Opie says it’s a matter of principle. “If I had photographed more roughly it would have been more transgressive, but using the pictorial canon to your advantage allows you to involve the viewer more, especially the one from 1993 or 1994. After all, who is my audience? Who am I captivating? How do I transfer my world to a more universal language? ”.
That formalism seems to convey compassion. Can you get anywhere without compassion?
Now they would tell you that it is a requirement. My fury is there, in the decision to take those photos. I think it is quite clear how I am politically aligned as a human being: I like a democratic world in which we can all participate in improving life. Inequality is very frustrating and I meditate on it a lot in my work, but I don’t think that by getting angry I will add more to the conversation. I appreciate irate artists: Sue Williams early paintings or performances Karen Finley’s show very important forms of anger, but in my work I tend to be more attentive than angry.
I was talking before about Instagram and how the networks have changed photography. How have you seen this transformation since the nineties? I am very interested that this constant documentation capacity that we have acquired has strengthened both several incredible social movements. Without that girl [Darnella Frazer] that recorded the murder of George Floyd, where would we be? I like how the political instincts of ordinary people have been strengthened. I do not like the sarcasm of the internet, that pettiness and that desire to lower the fumes to everyone is quite choking me. But now we all have a camera in tow that allows us to witness. I am not saying living in a perpetual state of vigilance, but witnessing inequalities and injustices. Photography can change laws. I got started on this myself by Lewis Hine, whose images of children at work prompted Congress to change the legislation on the matter. [en 1924]. So yes, I support the idea of an image-saturated culture, if understood ethically. Of course, in general, as citizens of this imperfect world, there is nothing that we should not understand ethically.
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