Photo Op

Catherine Opie's Political Polaroids 

Portrait of Barack, 2008. Polaroid, 41/8 x 3 9/16 inches

Created by the artist for Modern Painters.
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CO: It becomes something that people make dirty. They wouldn’t just think like: Oh, look at that beautiful photograph of her son nude, the most natural thing in the world. I saw what happened to Sally Mann. I saw how she went back to the landscape. And if I was a writer, I would talk about the fact that Sally Mann had to go from that work to a return to landscape.

AH: But it’s also interesting that part of that shift was the progression of her children. They got older and either didn’t want to be photographed or, in the case of one, really did want to be photographed. Which, again, is a fascinating psychological thing. Her subject matter changed. In some ways, she went as far as she could go. But it will be interesting to see what happens next. She sent me, a long time ago, this huge picture of her and her daughters, naked on a rock, peeing.

CO: That sounds beautiful.

AH: She had written on it: Photo not washed. Will probably turn a fabulous piss yellow. It’s a wild picture of them, in a very celebratory stance. Any new work?

CO: Yes, and I have a new author that I’m playing off: Rebecca Solnit. I really like how she writes about landscapes. And that’s what I’m thinking about: landscapes. I recently did a body of work in Alaska called “The Blue of Distance,” which refers to her writings.

AH: What is it about her evocation of distance that catches you?

CO: It’s the way that she describes landscape in terms of the horizon line, which is similar to what I was playing with in my icehouses and Alaska images. She’s able to talk about distance in terms of a spatial relationship. Often, people don’t talk about the horizon in relationship to space; they talk about it more metaphorically. It’s especially pertinent to these time-based pieces that I’m playing with now. Instead of being one-off shots that I put together as a horizon, I’m creating these works in direct relationship to time. Generally, I think I’m influenced by what’s surrounding me, or what’s in the media. Going off to Alaska last summer, I had no anticipation of making a body of work that would become an exhibition. It was supposed to be a theater piece at this teeny, lovely theater in Juneau called Perseverance. I was going to make a series of landscapes, and then try to find a writer to work with, who in a Rebecca Solnit kind of way would make a very esoteric play in relationship to everything—from queer politics to getting stoned to the beach. These shifting landscapes of light that I did in sequence were supposed to pass behind the actors. But then the theater fell apart the week I was there photographing the art—both directors quit—and I took 1,200 photographs in 10 days.

AH: In Alaska?

CO: Yes, I photographed eight hours a day. I started sequencing passing moments on a boat, using these subtle shifts within the landscape to create this metaphor for ideas of time and nature. One piece is called “The Edge of Time,” which is a sequence of nine photographs that follows a cliff edge. It’s a very confusing piece to look at because your eye goes back and forth. You know that you’ve just seen a little bit of this landscape in the previous photograph. But, then, perspectivally, it doesn’t match up. As each segment gets revealed, more of a new segment gets revealed. Because it’s not a true panoramic; it’s optically confusing. I think that works well metaphorically, and they’re fun to make. I actually started enjoying making photographs again last year. I was tired of it, and I finally found my footing. I’m interested again. [Laughs] Which is a good thing, seeing as that’s what I do. 

“Catherine Opie: American Photographer” is on view at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, through Jan. 7. 

"Photo Op" originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2008 Table of Contents.