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Installation views of Catherine Opie: In Dialogue, Van Every/Smith Galleries at Davidson College.

Catherine Opie is one of the most important American photographers of our time. For more than three decades she has used her artistic practice to help us see people, places, and subcultures that are often overlooked. Opie has created seminal portraits of the LGBTQIA community, as well as images of high school football players, California surfers, protesters, and tender portraits of herself, friends, and family. She has also drawn our attention to both the natural and built environments, capturing domestic interiors, mini-malls, monuments, freeways, national parks, memorials, and swamps. In her role as a witness, Opie has equally presented back to us both the good and the bad, the losses and the gains, the constructive and the destructive.

In Dialogue presents four series from 2016-2020. The Modernist, Opie’s first foray into film, is a haunting narrative composed of more than 800 black-and-white photographs that speaks to the unattainable utopian promises of modernist architecture in Los Angeles. Opie’s Political Collages rely on The Modernist’s aesthetics of magazine and newspaper clippings. These quirky animations about serious issues, including gun control and environmental catastrophe, are presented on oversized monitors that reference iPhones, a primary way many of us now take in news. Her seven-part artwork, monument/monumental, along with photographic diptychs from her 2020 series, capture the socio-political landscape during an unprecedented year, shot while on a road trip from Los Angeles to the southeastern United States. Through poignant juxtapositions of images highlighting the COVID-19 pandemic, police violence, the removal of confederate monuments, the 2020 presidential election, protests, and more, Opie captures the complexities of a nation divided.

Opie’s work is as vital as ever. In the 2024 political climate the personal freedoms of women, LGBTQIA+ individuals, and people of color are particularly under threat, we hope this presentation inspires us to come together and reflect on our similarities rather than our differences and to collectively consider ways to foster a more inclusive and thriving society for all.

Elizabeth Bradford, Dying Poke, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 36 inches, Courtesy of the Artist

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