Catherine Opie at The Guggenheim Museum

If you are planning a trip to New York this autumn, I think that a visit to Catherine Opie’s exhibition “Catherine Opie: American Photographer” at the Guggenheim Museum is a must for any lesbian. Queer photographer Catherine Opie’s mid-career retrospective gathers works from many of Opie’s well known series, starting with works of art from the beginning of the 1990’ies. Catherine Opie once said “Everything I photograph has the connotation of being messy or of being a bad thing”. She is a provocateur who has made lots of eye-catching queer portraits. She has photographed butch lesbians, drag kings, sadomasochists in leather, dessolate cityscapes and the freeways of Los Angeles. Recently she has focused on the domestic life of a queer family.

A catalogue is accompanying exhibition. The Museum writes that this is the first monograph “to gather all of the artist’s key projects to date in a single volume. Each of Opie’s series in the exhibition among them Portraits, Freeways, Domestic, American Cities, Icehouses, and In and Around Home is reproduced in full-color plates alongside works featured exclusively here, allowing for the most complete overview of the artist¹s work yet assembled”.

“Catherine Opie: American Photographer” continues through Jan. 7 2009 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum New York, USA.
Read also a review of the exhibition by The New York Times.

The catalogue

Catherine Opie: American Photographer
by Dorothy Allison, Jennifer Blessing, Nat Trotman, Russell Ferguson and photographer Catherine Opie
Published by Guggenheim Museum, 2008
ISBN-10: 0892073756
ISBN-13: 978-0892073757