Catherine Opie on why National Portrait Gallery exhibition still feels ‘radical’ for a ‘butch d***’

One thing that immediately strikes you when you enter the second floor space at the National Portrait Gallery – which for a few short weeks is housing a vast breadth of Catherine Opie’s work – is the sense of being watched, but more specifically being seen. 

Decades worth of photographed eyes gaze out from images of mustachioed lesbians, tattooed lovers and adolescent football players, observing us as we do them, making us subject as much as they are. It renegotiates the dynamic of who is being seen and who is doing the seeing. It makes queer bodies, identities and lived-experiences centred in their visibility, when so often they are relegated to the periphery.   

At a time when the LGBTQ+ community, particularly trans, non-binary and gender-nonconforming folks, face increased censorship, surveillance and legislation in the public sphere, Opie’s work is more resonant than ever. 

Catherine Opie: To Be Seen runs from 5 March to 31 May at the National Portrait Gallery in London and is the first major museum exhibition of her work in the UK.

It is a “dream come true”, Opie told PinkNews at a press preview of the exhibition.

“This is what artists, especially an artist like myself that loves portraiture so much, would hope that they could have their work in an institution like this,” she explains. 

“It’s really moving. I’m never going to forget it.” 

Born in Ohio, Opie lived there during the early part of her childhood before moving to California with her family in 1975. 

Inspired by the work of Lewis Hine, she told her parents she wanted to be a photographer when she was just nine-years-old and so they purchased her a Kodak instamatic camera. 

One of the first photographs she took was a self-portrait and the black-and-white image shows Opie standing in front of their family home in Sandusky, Ohio, her hair short, wearing thick-rimmed glasses and flexing her muscles. 

It is this image, entitled Self-Portrait, that greets you as you enter the exhibition. 

Opie readily admitted that the young child in that image could never have imagined displaying their work somewhere like the National Portrait Gallery. 

“I don’t think that you ever think as an artist, even when you go to art school, that you’ll ever be a success, whatever, not an exhibiting artist. 

“I won’t say a ‘successful’ artist, because I don’t like that terminology, but an exhibiting artist. 

“It’s humbling. It’s always humbling,” she adds. “One should never assume that they get to have this, this ability within their work but I work really hard as an artist, and I’m really grateful that my work moves so many people and it’s so important to the public.” 

The image of Opie as a child is positioned slightly opposite to Bo, another self-portrait of Opie taken years later in 1994 as her titular male alter-ego. 

In that photograph, Opie is looking squarely at the camera, her thumbs hooked into the pockets of dark jeans, a thick black belt holding them up with a sleeveless plaid shirt tucked in. There were no thick-rimmed glasses but Opie’s hair was still short, and this time she donned a mustache. 

It is an unabashedly queer self-portrait, pulling focus to a gender-nonconforming body and making us interrogate strict the binary of gender expression – both for ourselves and others. 

Speaking to The Guardian, Opie said at the time the photograph was taken she and her friends would “put on moustaches and ride our motorcycles to a lesbian bar in LA and we would offer women rides home”.  

“Drag was not really that big then,” Opie told the outlet, “it was in a certain dyke subculture but not in LA – so they were all like, ‘Ahhh, I don’t know what to do with you!’” 

Opie has previously described herself in Self-Portrait as where she “definitely looked like a little baby dyke” and Bo could be viewed as the natural progression of that; childhood and adulthood, the past and (then) present. But nothing about Opie’s work is so dyadic. 

While she is the artist, she is not separate from her art. While the photograph is a self-portrait, it is no different from the portraits she takes of others. She is part of her community, and her community is part of her. 

Much of Opie’s work sees her represent and engage with queerness, in all its intersectional, complex and sometimes contradictory reality, alongside wider ideas of home, intimacy and family. 

Lesbians at the kitchen table, leather, scars, a naked Diana Nyad, Opie breastfeeding her son Oliver, all of this uniqueness and normalcy features in Opie’s work.

This is best exemplified in Being and Having (1991) – a stand-out part of the exhibition in my opinion – which is a collection of 13 close-up photographs of Opie and her queer friends wearing faux facial hair and other stereotypical masculine accessories. Taken on a yellow background, the works were inspired by portraits by 16th century court painter Hans Holbein. 

From a distance the images could be mistaken to be of cis men but as you approach clues and details – purposefully included and made visible by Opie – can be identified, such as the webbing of the facial hair’s glue. In this way, the images come to be revealed to represent a performance of gender identity and masculinity that seeks to make us, the viewer, question our own conceptions of what it constitutes and how we navigate that.  

The collection came at a time when traditional Western concepts of gender, and the binary of male/female, was being fundamentally destabilised. Notably, Judith Butler’s seminal text Gender Trouble was only released a year earlier. 

Opie’s work has often been described as “radical” but to the artist herself that is inherently the problem “because I’m just a girl from the Midwest who grew up across from cornfield”. 

In this, she goes on to note Domestic (1995-1998) – a series that captured the everyday lives of lesbian families in their homes and some works of which are featured in To Be Seen – and describes how she lectured on that series and would point out to the audience washer and dryer in the photograph and call it a “lesbian washer and dryer”. 

“Half the audience would laugh and the other half of the audience didn’t understand that reference, but my reference was that we have the same washer and dryers as you,” she says. 

“We have the same everything, but then you have this perception that we’re the Other. We’ve never been radical. 

Opie continues: “I think there’s far more f**ked up radical things. Quite honestly, look at what’s happening in terms of [the Epstein Files].” 

Opie is no stranger to the culture wars, she explained as much in a talk given to the press about her career and the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. 

As someone who lived through the AIDS crisis, when her community was ravaged by a virus that was politically convenient to ignore, Opie has seen first-hand how queer lives are systematically subjugated as lesser. 

It is something we are acutely aware of today, happening to our trans siblings who are being legislated out of public life.     

“We thought when we were doing this, it would go to the US,” Opie says of the exhibition. 

“We didn’t know Trump was going to win. I really had all the hope in the world that it would end up in the Smithsonian, at the National Portrait Gallery. 

“It’s more important now with both the show in Germany and here, that I’m an American artist representing this moment in an incredibly horrible time within my country.”

Opie says she is “proud” to be American and acknowledged her family moved to the country in 1690, so “it’s a very long country that I’ve had a relationship to historically within my own family lineage”. 

“Then to also be who I am as a lesbian and as a butch dyke, to be able to have this moment in an institution such as this, I think there’s still a radicality to that,” Opie said. 

She added: “I don’t think I’ll ever change somebody from being homophobic, but I think that at least they’ll have to question their own ideas of what humanity is.”