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CATHERINE OPIEINTERVIEW BY AMY KELLNER One of Catherine Opie’s most famous photographs is Pervert, a self-portrait in which she sits topless, her head encased in a shiny black hood, 46 needles inserted into her skin in neat rows all along her arms, with the word “pervert” freshly carved into her chest in fancy script. That was the 90s, when identity politics were new and exciting and when Opie was pretty much the official documentary photographer of the lesbian/gay/transgender/BDSM/radical-performance-art community. I bring this photo up only because it’s mentioned a few times in this interview, but as Opie herself points out, it does always seem to be the first thing people talk about when describing her work. It’s kind of hard not to. But of course that’s just a small part of it. In her giant retrospective at the Guggenheim last year, she showed about 200 photos from the past two decades—formal photos of Beverly Hills houses, LA freeways and mini-malls, icehouses in Minnesota, and urban landscapes in Chicago, New York, St. Louis, and Minneapolis, along with portraits of surfers and high school football players and, yeah, OK, lots and lots of lesbians. It’s all about communities. Communities and ladies with excellent moustaches.
Vice: Can you tell me about this group of photos? Catherine Opie: They’re all from my archive. I’m working on this new body of work for an exhibition called “Girlfriends,” where I’m photographing kind of iconic butch lesbians, and I’m also pulling out all these black-and-white square-format photographs I did throughout the 80s and 90s, as these little moments of sexy desire and memory. It’s kind of like an ode to my former life, before domesticity and motherhood. [laughs] I’m not really hanging out in the dungeons anymore or shooting the SM community in the way I used to. Does looking at these make you nostalgic for those times? Yeah, it’s really fun to go through the archive. I don’t think I would have dared touch the archive like I’m doing now if it wasn’t for this exhibition that I’m planning. And also coming off of having 20 years of work being up at the Guggenheim, it gives me a different kind of permission to re-enter my work and look at things that are just part of what a voracious documenter I was. Often I decided not to show certain photos for different reasons, like following too closely on the heels of Mapplethorpe or wanting to get tenure as a teacher. [laughs] Kind of conservative reasons. Yet I’ll put Pervert out there, which doesn’t make any sense. That’s the dichotomy of me. But how would these photos affect getting tenure? Well, early on that was my fear, and then I realized that my fear wasn’t real. I thought, “Oh, great, they’re never going to give tenure to somebody as out and as radical as me.” It probably turned out to be the opposite, right? Yeah, but I didn’t know at the time. I thought, “Oh God, I’m going to shoot myself in the foot here.” So you had all these cool photos that were sitting there, waiting. Yeah, I have a ton of them! They kind of remind me of the deck of cards you once made, with portraits of lesbians on each card. Oh, Dyke Deck! That was around the same time, it’s true. I loved that. I remember going through the deck and studying each card so closely. They were all such different, strange types of women. I know, it was really fun to do that. I did an open call in San Francisco. A good portion of them were friends, but some were people I had never even met. They just came and performed for me, and it was so fun. So these portraits are of friends of yours? Yeah, they’re friends or lovers. Who’s that one person with the crown of thorns? That’s Pig Pen. She’s got needles in her noodle. Yeah, it was for a Ron Athey performance we did in Mexico City. That’s just a backstage photograph I snapped of Piggy. You’re not involved in the SM scene at all anymore? I still have a lot of friends involved in it, but between being a full-time professor and an artist and a mom and a partner, it’s not like I get to have that much time to go and explore and play. My partner’s definitely open to knowing that it’s a part of me, and I have carte blanche to go to San Francisco or play here in Los Angeles, but to tell you the truth, I just don’t have any time to be in that space. And also, all of a sudden when you’re taking care of a child, your brain doesn’t easily switch to “Oh, now I’m going to hurt somebody.” I can see how those two states don’t quite fit in together. For some people it does. I have other friends who are players, who are parents, and they don’t have a problem with it, but it was never completely a part of my everyday life in LA. It was mainly a San Francisco-based community that I would go visit. You don’t hear that much about the SM scene anymore. It seems like it was popular in the 90s and then it disappeared again. Well, it’s not fashionable anymore. There was a little moment when it became very much a part of popular culture. I remember when my friends in LA opened Club Fuck. We were finally making this really cool, alternative gay club for ourselves, where we could do performative pieces in relationship to SM, and all of a sudden all the hipster coolio heterosexuals were coming to it. Then it became this whole other crowd that was just coming to watch the “freaks,” which was what we were trying to get away from. Do you think you had a hand in the popularization of SM? I think I recall you saying that you wanted to show the SM community in, was it, a “normal” sort of way? With more humanity. I wanted them to be very humanistic. That’s probably why I haven’t printed the black-and-white work as much as the color portrait work or even the self-portraits. These are a little grittier, I suppose. They’re also very classical and beautiful, but some of them have an edge to them that I didn’t allow to come out before, because I was conscious of what those ideas of representation begin to do. I don’t look at a lot of porn, but my boss sure does, and he says that SM has become an accepted norm for most straight porn. That’s your doing. I think it wasn’t just me, it was a bunch of other people as well. What happens is things become mainstream when they become imaged over and over again. Something happens in relationship to ideas of representation that makes it more palatable or digestible. I guess to a certain extent it isn’t as taboo anymore. And then it’s like, great, what do I do now that my taboo is all boring? I’ve been thinking about that, and I think it’s just absolute extreme body modification. People are splitting their tongues and doing even more extreme things to their bodies. I think it’s so interesting, that idea of, like, what is transgressive? How can you truly be transgressive at this point within our culture? Well, I think you going from the SM scene to being a mom, and all your new photos are these blissful domestic scenes—that’s shocking in a way, because people want to keep those kind of separate. They do want to keep it separate. So basically, becoming homogenized and part of mainstream domesticity is transgressive for somebody like me. Ha. That’s a very funny idea. It is, right? I mean, I’m not living in suburbia yet, but there could be a moment. I got rid of the minivan. I did have a minivan for a long time. From the photos, it seems suburban. Well, it’s South Central, but we do have a house and a yard and a swing set in the back of our yard. Cozy. Three dogs, a cat, a turtle, and five chickens. Oh, cute. I know. It’s all good. I’m not complaining, that’s for sure.
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