Catherine Opie Interview: Seeing and Being Seen in Photography
From London’s National Portrait Gallery to the politics of visibility, the artist reflects on portraiture, queer bodies, family, and what it means to keep looking when society wants you to look away
Short version on Artribune (Italian)
My work has always played on the boundary between document and conceptual art making. I am interested in what it means to bear witness through photography and, at the same time, to challenge documentary as a genre through a formal approach.
I first encountered Catherine Opie’s photography a few years ago in Naples, during her exhibition Walls, Windows and Blood. I still remember the silence of those rooms, and yet how saturated they felt with presence. In those landscapes without human figures, I sensed the ghosts of history, an invisible humanity Opie could evoke with a touch that was both poetic and documentary.
That vision struck me deeply: there was emotional force in the way Catherine made the invisible visible, restoring dignity to places and people pushed to the margins.
I had the chance to speak with her. Catherine Opie, born in 1961 in Ohio and active for decades in Los Angeles, is one of the most authoritative voices in contemporary photography. Her work, intense portraits of friends and LGBTQ+ communities, iconic self portraits, and urban and natural landscapes from the United States to Europe, explores identity, family, gender, and the relationship between the individual and society.
Catherine is preparing her first major museum exhibition in the United Kingdom, titled To Be Seen. It will open on 5 March 2026 at the National Portrait Gallery in London and run through 31 May 2026, marking her first significant museum exhibition in the UK. Represented by Lehmann Maupin, she will present roughly 80 works, aiming to bring into focus communities and figures too often ignored in art.
She smiles, her voice warm and direct, animated by the same authenticity that runs through her photographs.
What follows is our conversation, an openhearted dialogue about her new London show, the bond between classical aesthetics and photographic language, the representation of the queer body, the political charge of art, and the next projects of an artist who has never stopped taking risks.
To Be Seen: London’s major exhibition and photography as visibility
What does this retrospective represent for you, and what content and emotion do you want to bring to a European audience?
This show is an opportunity for me to share a dialogue I have carried my whole life through photography. To Be Seen gathers work made over more than thirty years: portraits of friends, fellow travelers, members of my queer community, but also self portraits and images of places that hold social histories. The central idea is precisely being seen, giving visibility and dignity to subjects and communities that have too often been feared or pushed to the margins. I hope London and European audiences feel that invitation to reflect on who gets pictured in art history, and who has been excluded.
The National Portrait Gallery will present selected works that speak to themes that matter to me, family, identity, belonging, and the development of my artistic language. There will be images ranging from my early photographs in the 1990s, Being and Having for example, with portraits of queer friends in “noble” poses inspired by Renaissance painting, to more recent photographs that question the political present. It is a wide selection, but focused. For instance, there is only one pure landscape in this show, an abstract image of the White Cliffs of Dover that I photographed during the Brexit period while thinking about migration. That, too, is a kind of collective portrait: a landscape that speaks about a historical moment and the people implicated in it, even without showing them directly.
As for my expectations, more than sharp differences between European and American audiences, I hope to spark a conversation about the role of photography. My work has always played on the boundary between document and conceptual art making.I am interested in what it means to bear witness through photography and, at the same time, to challenge documentary as a genre through a formal approach. My portraits, for example, are partly documents of real lives, real people with real histories, but I make them with a considered, constructed, almost painterly style that steps away from traditional reportage.
I would like European audiences to feel the power of these images to testify to reality, and also to ask questions about how we see and understand others. And I will admit it, I am curious to witness the reactions. Coming to Europe with a show of this scale is emotional.
If viewers leave feeling they have “seen” not only photographs, but people, faces, bodies, stories they might have ignored before, then I will have achieved what I set out to do.
(Photo courtesy of the artist)
From Michelangelo to Opie: Photography as an art historical language
Your aesthetic approach seems to evolve in dialogue with classical art, and to challenge it. I think of bold comparisons: Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Rembrandt. In your portraits there is an echo of the great masters, the idealized and sacrificed body like Michelangelo’s Pieta, Caravaggio’s blunt truth of flesh, Rembrandt’s psychological depth and light. How has art history shaped the way you photograph? Do you use photography as a formal language to give new life and dignity to contemporary subjects who once would not have had a place in museums?
Absolutely. From the beginning I looked at the canon of classical portraiture and then tried to subvert it from the inside. I love composition, light, and the gravity of great painters. I think of Hans Holbein, for instance, or Rembrandt himself, and I wanted to apply that formality to my subjects, who were friends and members of the LGBTQ+ community in the 1980s and 1990s, people who were often viewed with fear or prejudice at the time. Using a “museum” aesthetic to portray queer individuals was, for me, both an act of love and an act of protest. It meant saying: we, too, deserve to be portrayed with the same seriousness and beauty once reserved for princes or saints.
If we think of the perfection of the body in Michelangelo’s Pieta, that ideal Christ turned into a symbol of sacrifice, or Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin, where Mary is painted as a real woman without embellishment, the story even says he used the body of a drowned woman as his model, we see that classical art has had revolutionary moments when reality bursts into the image.
I feel like an heir to that spirit. I bring the reality of queer bodies, with their imperfections, scars, truths, into the elevated formality of art. In my self portraits this dialogue is explicit. One of my photographic self portraits was shown next to a self portrait by Rembrandt in a recent exhibition. Seeing the vulnerability of a modern woman, me, overheated in the Venetian summer, with fogged glasses and a chain around my neck, beside the melancholy dignity of a young Rembrandt, creates a bridge across time. It reminds us that, centuries apart, portraiture still tries to grasp something human, and that ornament and bodily vulnerability can coexist.
Ultimately, photography can carry tradition and push it forward. I use classical formality, neutral backgrounds, frontal poses, a certain restraint, to invite viewers to approach those faces and bodies with respect. Once I have their attention through something aesthetically familiar, the echo of older painting, I can reveal what traditional portraiture did not show: the diversity of the real world.The image becomes a kind of Trojan horse. It enters the eye like a “classic,” but once it is inside the viewer’s mind, it releases the force of stories and identities that have long been kept in shadow.
The queer body, family, and identity: From Self Portrait/Cutting to Nursing
The queer body is often central in your work, as a symbol of identity and affirmation. I think of iconic images. In Self Portrait/Cutting (1993) you carved into your back a simple drawing of a house and two female stick figures holding hands, an innocent scene rendered in blood, an act both painful and full of desire. In Self Portrait/Nursing (2004) you portrayed yourself breastfeeding your son, invoking the tradition of the Madonna and Child and overturning it, your tattooed body marked by time, your butch identity coexisting with motherhood. How did these radical works emerge, and what did you want to communicate about family, motherhood, and gender within LGBTQ+ life?
Self Portrait/Cutting came out of a difficult but crucial period. In the early 1990s the United States was in the middle of the culture wars. Queer art and the homosexual body were under attack, think of the controversies around Mapplethorpe in Congress, while the AIDS epidemic was devastating my community and the Reagan government looked away. I was a young lesbian artist determined not to hide.
In Cutting I wanted to imprint, literally on my skin, the dream of a family that was being denied to us. That naive drawing, a house, two smiling female figures under the sun, looks like a preschool picture. It evokes the universal idea of a happy family. But carving it with a knife into my back, and then photographing the blood, meant showing how painful it was for queer people to fight to be recognized, to be able to love and be parents in the open. It was an extreme act of love, and a political cry at the same time.
Then Self Portrait/Nursing. Ten years later, that dream had partly materialized. In 2004 I photographed myself breastfeeding my newborn son, Oliver. Again there is a reference to classical iconography, the Madonna and Child, but with a powerful shift. I am not the Virgin Mary. I am a forty something lesbian with a marked body.In the decade before, I made Self Portrait/Pervert, carving the word “Pervert” into my chest. In Nursing I show my breast as I feed my son. I wear simple pants, my hair is short. I look proud, but also vulnerable, exhausted like any new mother.
I wanted to celebrate the normality and the exceptionality of that scene: a queer mother breastfeeding her child after years of being told that a butch woman could not, or should not, become a mother. I became one without renouncing my identity. There is a deliberate contradiction in the image: the same body society labeled “perverse” and outside the norm is now portrayed in a gesture of maternal care that is sacred and universal.
With these works I wanted to expand the idea of family and gender. To show that LGBTQ+ people have hearts, bodies, and bonds of love and blood like anyone else. And at the same time, to challenge stereotypes, both straight stereotypes and stereotypes within gay communities.Some friends struggled to understand how I could desire motherhood while being butch. I believe gender identity is not a rigid scheme, but a wide spectrum. There are as many ways to be a woman as there are women, and the same for men, and for those who do not recognize themselves in binaries.
In my case I wanted to demonstrate that you can be a masculine presenting gay woman and also a loving mother. My real body, imperfect, not young, not aligned with conventional ideals, deserves representation in art because it bears witness to an authentic human experience.
Ultimately, works like Cutting and Nursing assert this: we are here, with our wounds and our love, and our story deserves to be seen and remembered.
(Photo courtesy of the artist)
Art and politics: The role of the artist in America today
You told me it is almost impossible for you to avoid politics, and your art has always been intrinsically political. Looking at America today, it can feel like we have fallen back into a climate of cultural war: censorship and controversy around art and education, waves of conservatism, authoritarian drift. People even talk about putting content warnings in museums to alert audiences to “strong” works. From your point of view, what is an artist’s responsibility in a time this tense? Have you ever felt censored or obstructed? And how do you experience your own commitment, even activist commitment, through photography?
In the United States we are truly living through a new edition of the culture wars. It is sad to say it, but battles we thought we had fought in the 1990s are returning with more force: attacks on art deemed “uncomfortable,” restrictions on academic freedom, demonization of LGBTQ+ people. As an artist, I cannot and do not want to avoid politics, because my life and my community are touched by these realities every day.In the 1980s and 1990s, photographing queer people, fetish communities, or simply people outside the norm was already a political act, and it still is. Today I continue on that path, maybe with even more urgency.
I have to say I hate the idea of content warnings on works of art. It has happened that an American museum, showing Self Portrait/Cutting for example, wanted to post a warning sign for “strong content.” I find it a subtle form of censorship. It assumes the public cannot handle looking at a photograph and it ends up reinforcing prejudice. As I often say, I will put a warning on my photographs on the day the Vatican puts warnings on its crucifixions and martyrdom scenes, which is to say, never. Art should hit you, and if necessary, unsettle you. The role of the museum and the artist is to contextualize and explain, not to hide.
As for personal risk, yes, I will admit that in recent years I have felt a bit of fear. I have even joked, but not entirely, that one day I could mount a show in Europe and not be allowed back into the United States if the political situation worsens and someone decides my art “betrays the nation’s values.” It sounds like fiction, but the atmosphere is heavy. We have seen attacks on civil rights, raids against migrants and minorities that feel like something out of a dystopian film. I come from an American family that has been here for generations, and it hurts to see my country sliding toward authoritarian impulses. But that does not make me quiet. On the contrary, I believe artists have a duty to bear witness and challenge injustice. Photography, in particular, is powerful because it creates visual evidence. It confronts you with reality. I think of my photographs of protests, crowds marching for rights. They are part of my work just as much as studio portraits, because they record a piece of collective history.
Ultimately, I still believe in art as a form of civic activism. I do not presume to “save the world” with my photographs, but I can help keep attention alive, ask questions, encourage empathy. And if that attracts criticism or requires taking some risk, so be it. As I said earlier, what matters is not letting yourself be reduced to silence. By showing truth, whether it is the pain of a wound, the proud face of someone marginalized, or the violence of a protest in the street, I hope to create a space where the audience can question, and perhaps become more aware. In dark times, art can be an uncomfortable but necessary light.
(Photo courtesy of the artist)
From teaching to creative freedom: Opie’s next horizons
After more than thirty years in academia, and I understand you recently stepped away from university teaching, and with your son now grown and independent, you are in a personal turning point. For the first time you can devote yourself fully to making art. How does this new freedom feel? Do you already have new projects or directions in mind? In the past you photographed many landscapes, I think of your Venice series or urban panoramas in the United States. Will you use this phase to travel, and perhaps return to panoramic photography?
I feel excited, as if I am beginning a new artistic life. In April I will turn sixty five. I taught at the university for thirty two years and raised my son Oliver, who is now an adult living on his own. After decades of balancing my artistic practice with being a mother and a professor, I can finally wear only the artist hat, so to speak. It is liberating, and a little dizzying. I plan to use this freedom to travel and make projects I may have kept on the back burner.For example, I am planning to take my large panoramic camera, a seven by seventeen inch “banquet” format, to Washington, DC to photograph the buildings of power, a project that closes the circle with the American Cities series I made in the 1990s. And I want to work in Europe again. The experience of photographing in Venice for six weeks years ago was magical and formative.
I was chasing the shadow of Canaletto and ended up making images that were very intimate, including a self portrait where I appear sweaty and disheveled after a day wandering through the alleys, the one we discussed earlier. I remember that at night, exhausted, I would jump into the lagoon to cool off. Landscape photography can be physically demanding, but also cathartic.
Right now I feel like an explorer who can choose any destination or subject. I will certainly keep photographing my America, its faces and its places, because it is an ongoing story I want to follow. But I am open to new inspirations. It could be an untouched natural landscape, or perhaps the ocean. I love water, as my work about surfers suggests. What matters is keeping the curiosity and freedom to experiment that, in the past, when I was splitting myself between roles, I sometimes had to compress. Now I have the chance to immerse myself fully in projects, to “read the world” with calm and attention, and then translate it into images. It is a privilege, and I intend to honor it by exploring every new creative horizon that appears. In the end, I feel I still have many stories to tell and visions to share, and this new phase of my life invites me to do so without holding back.
(Photo courtesy of the artist)
I end my interview with Catherine Opie with my heart full of ideas and images. Her words led me through thirty years of art and life lived with courage, from blood shed for a dream of family, to portraits built like bridges between past and present, to the new creative freedom now galloping toward her on the back of her “Lesbian Cowboy.” What strikes me most is the profoundly human coherence of her path. Opie uses photography as both mirror and window, reflecting herself and her community while opening a view for all of us onto worlds too often ignored. Dignity, visibility, the truth of bodies and stories, themes that surfaced throughout this conversation, are an invitation to look at art, and reality, with new eyes.
As I sign off, I cannot help returning to the question her work keeps pressing on us: who deserves to be seen? The answer her photographs suggest is simple: everyone. Every person, every body, carries a story worthy of attention. It is up to us, as viewers and as a society, to find the right way of looking to recognize it.
(Photo courtesy of the artist)
