Catherine Opie in Dialog with Maggie Nelson

This story is taken from the Spring/Summer 2026 challenge of AnDifferent Magazine: 

On a stupendous November morning in Los Angeles, I discovered my approach to the Brewery, the place Catherine Opie retains her studio. I’ve recognized her since I moved to LA 20 years in the past – certainly, the actual fact of Cathy’s presence right here, as an LA-based artist, professor and queer householder, made the town really feel extra attainable for me, after I was a bewildered exile from New York. 

Cathy has recognized my accomplice, the artist Harry Dodge, for for much longer; her portrait Flipper, Tanya, Chloe, & Harriet, San Francisco, California (1995, Domestic sequence) is considered one of my favorite photos of him from the outdated days. (Cathy additionally photographed me as soon as, for a 2021 profile in The New York Times.) After all this historical past, it was a significant pleasure to spend this time collectively to mark her exhibition on the National Portrait Gallery, London – Catherine Opie: To Be Seen – going deeper into a number of the narratives I already knew and studying every kind of recent issues about an icon and a pal.

MAGGIE NELSON: I presume we get to speak freely and we are able to edit if we have to. 

CATHERINE OPIE: It’s a free speak and I’m an open e-book. You can ask me no matter you need to ask me. Thank you, initially, for interviewing me. You’re any individual that I’ve at all times needed to have write about my work and I simply respect you as a thinker. 

MN: Thank you, Cathy, I’m glad to do it. Maybe we are able to begin on the very starting – the self-portrait at age 9. I used to be actually concerned about your expertise of taking photos as a bit of child. Because, as a author, I can at all times see what I’ve made instantly – there’s no delay. But I’m guessing that you just had a delay … 

CO: Yeah, as a result of we’d go to the grocery retailer after which they’d develop the roll of movie, after which I needed to wait until my mother picked up the prints and introduced them house to me.

MN: In the [National Portrait Gallery] catalogue on your new present, To Be Seen, it says that you just favored photographing cease indicators and automobiles and principally the whole lot, so in my thoughts I used to be considering of two parallel tracks of expertise. One, the child going out, having this expertise, after which the one that will get the stuff again and appears on the fruits of all of your wanting and labour. Did you expertise these two tracks as completely completely different actions? Did it really feel just like the digital camera, whenever you have been little, was a approach of taking a look at your atmosphere the place you have been carving out your individual particular person house or take? Do you keep in mind what it felt like?

CO: I’ve been considering lots about it, truly, as a result of I’ve been wanting with my mother at my very first album that my grandparents gave me on my birthday – they knew I used to be going to get a digital camera as a result of that’s what I requested. I began bringing these photos house and taping them in an album and making sense and order out of my story. I feel that one of many issues is that you just develop up and also you do loads of remedy in case you’ve had a troublesome childhood, which I had – one thing of a troublesome, compromised childhood. Now I take a look at these photos in a extremely completely different approach. I believed that possibly I used to be monitoring my atmosphere like I do now. I believed possibly each cease signal was as a result of I used to be attempting to determine house and neighbourhood and the whole lot I’ve tried to do as an grownup …

MN: Like a mapping or one thing?

CO: … like a mapping. But then I took my mother on a highway journey final 12 months and we went to Seneca Falls, New York, the place she grew up, for her ninetieth birthday. And I requested her, “Mom, when I was nine and I stopped wearing dresses, and I wanted to be a boy, did that all happen because I had already started being sexually abused?” I realised, going again and taking a look at the whole lot, “Oh, that’s the stop sign that my brother handcuffed me to all day long,” and, “This is actually bearing witness to trauma.” I believed I used to be mapping, however I used to be additionally attempting to make sense of the place I belonged and what I used to be doing on the earth after being dealt with very violently.

MN: That’s not one thing I’ve heard you discuss.

CO: No, it’s not public.

MN: Is that like a brand new lens for you?

CO: It’s changing into a brand new public lens. I got here out in my oral historical past on the Getty [the Getty Research Institute’s initiative to preserve the first-hand histories of important LA artists] about my sexual abuse. I’ve stayed actually distant from permitting that to be in my narrative due to a really particular factor – as quickly as any individual, similar to a lesbian, does cuttings on their physique [Self-Portrait/Cutting, 1993], individuals are going to routinely say that it’s out of trauma, and that’s not why that work was made. It was made out of blood and out of group as a result of my associates have been dying of Aids. It was the tradition wars and we have been all doing work that was pushing the envelope – Karen Finley’s performances, Annie Sprinkle, Ron Athey. I got here out of a group that was expressing issues at a really intense time. And then I realised that I needed to start out speaking a bit of bit about what my childhood was like as a result of I’m on this place of being nearly 65, and what’s it for us to carry secrets and techniques? What are secrets and techniques? So I’ve at all times held it actually tight, however now it’s being spoken.

MN: That’s fascinating as a result of I feel by holding it tight – and I’m not saying that everybody ought to maintain it tight – however by doing that, you’ve gotten allowed for many years of writing and interpretation of your work that simply didn’t use that.

CO: That didn’t have the private, diaristic story. 

MN: In some methods you’ve jammed the easiness of a trauma plot story. Even if somebody needs to place that on it now, it may well’t go as simply. I take into consideration Louise Bourgeois and others … all of the writing on the work that hyperlinks issues to childhood trauma – Bourgeois truly provided up this studying herself, although not till she was 71. But particularly with something that’s BDSM or that appears associated to working issues out sexually, tying it to any sort of sexual trauma or bodily abuse is such an overdetermined house.

“If you’re a woman, you never get to be anything but the victim” – Catherine Opie

CO: Also, from a girl’s perspective it’s very completely different. If a male artist had made these earlier self-portraits, possibly they’d have had a distinct sort of security web due to what the world supplies for males. If you’re a girl, you by no means get to be something however the sufferer. I’ve been desirous about that lots as a result of I learn [Virginia Giuffre’s memoir] Nobody’s Girl, as a result of I used to be actually curious to see how she would discuss this time – and that is work that you just’ve performed too inside your individual writing – however what has #MeToo performed for feminism is a extremely massive query for me. Has it empowered us? Yeah, to a sure extent very a lot so, nevertheless it’s nonetheless extremely sophisticated, the way in which that it’s learn in society and on the earth.

MN: For certain. I feel that to be a sexual topic not outlined by victimhood continues to be such an underdeveloped position for ladies. You have been in a position to try this, not only for your self, however in picturing so many individuals as brokers of a sexual life and exploration. I grew up in San Francisco however I left after I was 17 for the east coast. But loads of queer ladies within the Bay Area at the moment, particularly in and round Harry [Dodge’s] Bearded Lady efficiency house – I’m desirous about Michelle Tea’s writing particularly – typically celebrated this complete world sort of decontextualised, taking it by itself phrases, the place no one needed to are available with a historical past. Everyone may simply meet and be the place they have been at, and their proclivities and pursuits might be what they have been – no trauma plot required. But in a few of Michelle’s more moderen writing I’ve seen one other layer on prime of it, which is recognising retroactively, “Wow, I think a lot of us were working out a lot of trauma that we were bringing to that scene.”

CO: I feel there was, yeah.

MN: We didn’t actually discuss it in these phrases then.

CO: No, as a result of we created a secure house in another way by means of consensuality, the place it wasn’t speaking about what occurred, it was speaking about how we have been going to do no matter scene or play that was about consensuality. It’s fascinating that, typically, consensuality doesn’t essentially take care of post-trauma, however it’s woven in there like a effective silk thread.

MN: I train or discuss work from that period a lot and many individuals I do know actually did really feel like they might belief this group. I really feel like now there’s extra good discuss care in communities, however extra mistrust that communities will maintain them. Whereas then, there wasn’t as a lot express discuss care however there was extra belief that that was taking place. 

CO: There was. I’ve Pat [Califia’s] early S&M information, the lesbian S&M information too, the place it talks about what consensuality is throughout the group. When I joined The Outcasts [an organisation established in San Francisco in 1984 for women interested in BDSM] in 1984, which was based by Gayle [Rubin] and Pat and Dorothy Allison, that was my crew in San Francisco as I got here out as a leatherdyke – that they had actually already written the manuals round that. It did really feel extremely secure as a result of there was this e-book that instructed me easy methods to do it.

MN: For me coming of age within the early Nineties, I had an analogous feeling, whereby everybody you’re mentioning had come simply earlier than me, and I felt like there might be a “both/and” about this. This is each shameless, innocent, all good exercise, and we are able to additionally acknowledge that there’s every kind of loopy shit that’s in us and round us and has been in our previous. 

There’s this half within the National Portrait Gallery catalogue the place it says, “Cathy Opie’s work has always been about care, whether as a teacher, a mother, a photographer … ” I believed it was fascinating as a result of I train and I’ve at all times taught – however some folks attempt to preserve instructing out of their biography. You haven’t. 

CO: No. Whether it was Allan Sekula deciding to tear up my pictures in entrance of critique class and even my highschool images instructor ripping up my pictures – I’ve had loads of male lecturers rip up my pictures. Very fascinating that they assume it can go away. Will ripping up a print in entrance of a bunch of individuals make your work go away? No.

MN: I can’t consider that occurred. What was Sekula’s level?

CO: That I used to be a foul printer. I stated, “You said for us to bring work prints into class. If you want me to bring in finished prints, then I would imagine you would say, ‘I want finished prints.’” He goes, “Well, these work prints are just too bad.”

MN: Do you’re feeling like these experiences made you determine to be a distinct sort of instructor?

CO: Yeah. I by no means critique to take aside, solely to construct up. The critique is there nevertheless it’s by no means performed with out absolute care and hoping that I can attain what the scholars are attempting to attain and provides them extra info. That wasn’t the favored approach to go about criticism. I really feel like, in a bizarre approach, it was these early years after I was a scholar at San Francisco Art Institute, and at CalArts, that it was the excessive vital discourse. I graduated from CalArts in 1988, so we’re speaking Douglas Crimp, Catherine Lord, we’re speaking October journal up the wazoo. I wasn’t that sort of thinker, so I felt very beat up and really silly – “I’m not intelligent enough to be in this group of people.”

MN: Did you’re feeling such as you have been within the flawed place? 

CO: I feel that each place is the flawed place for me. It was for a extremely very long time. I feel to be settled as a human being is an extremely exhausting factor. That’s what I’ve learnt at nearly 65. Maybe all the emotions of me being within the flawed place or not adequate or that I used to be disappointing everyone round me, possibly the lostness that I felt throughout my childhood and that I used to be community-less … I keep in mind going to San Francisco Art Institute in 1981 and everyone was sporting black and I used to be nonetheless sporting polo shirts and got here from suburban Poway, California, and Ohio. I favored to play golf and I favored to swim, and that wasn’t going to fly in 1981 within the San Francisco artwork world. So I went off and I performed golf on my own and had a job on my own.

Idexa [Stern, the San Francisco-based tattoo artist] stated to me simply this previous week, “What’s interesting about you, Cathy, and about lesbian poker night, is that I think you have more communities than anybody I know. You don’t stick with one group. You’re not a posse person. You don’t have to have a specific group of people around you to feel complete.” 

MN: I’m actually concerned about you feeling such as you didn’t belong, as a result of folks write about your work so typically as –

CO: Community, group, group. I had a posse as soon as, after I moved to New York. I used to be going out with Daphne Fitzpatrick, in 1998, 1999. I didn’t get the job at UCLA, so I believed, “Well, I’m going out with a woman from New York. Let me just go ahead and apply for the job at Yale.” And I received it, which was surprising. I moved to New York for a 12 months and a half and that group are nonetheless my tight group of associates. They’ve all fractured in numerous methods, nevertheless it was the primary time in my life that I had a posse. But I’m probably not concerned about that, to let you know the reality. I really like friendship and I really like historical past and if one thing’s not working for me inside a friendship or inside a historical past, I attempt to repair it. But I’m additionally capable of let go as a result of I recognise, at nearly 65, how vital it’s to let go of issues that aren’t working.

MN: In the spirit of issues which are typically stated about your work – like with the Domestic sequence [1995–98], folks will say, “Cathy Opie was longing for a domestic space that she didn’t yet have.” Is that sentence a approach that you’d have conceptualised issues to your self at the moment?

CO: Yes and no. The reducing of the stick-figure ladies on my again was me undoubtedly wanting domesticity, realizing that I needed to be a mom, however there’s no youngster in that reducing. There’s not even a canine within the reducing. It’s simply two stick-figure ladies. We can learn lots into why I made that drawing. It was made after my first massive break-up, after my first home break-up. And it was with Pam [Gregg, an artist and curator].

MN: The first individual you lived with?

CO: The solely individual I lived with in addition to Julie [Burleigh, Opie’s ex-wife] in my whole life. Pam was for 2 years. She broke up with me and had an affair, and I sat there drawing these two stick-figure ladies on my notepad – when telephones have been nonetheless hooked up to cords and also you didn’t wander round the home, I might doodle the entire time. And then with the blood, my associates have been dying of Aids and so my coronary heart was damaged. Tony Greene had simply died. I used to be coping with main heartbreak. When I requested Judie Bamber to do the reducing, as a result of she had by no means performed cuttings earlier than, it was as a result of I needed the apprehension. I needed as a lot apprehension about what domesticity meant to me.

MN: What did she do it with?

CO: A scalpel, at all times a scalpel. She practised on hen breasts first as a result of she had by no means lower right into a physique earlier than, a stay physique. 

The motive I made that physique of labor and the rationale it was so vital was not due to my very own need for domesticity, it was due to the historical past of visible illustration. Peter Galassi did that vast present at MoMA – Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort – and there have been no queers in that. They have been exhibiting Greg Crewdson’s 8×10 work, Tina Barney’s 8×10 work, all this sort of images, and I knew a dyke would by no means be included in that present. So I made a decision to make my very own historical past inside that historical past. That’s why I made it. Because with out illustration there isn’t a visibility. That’s simply the way in which it goes.

MN: I used to be shocked and excited to study, studying this catalogue, that you’ve these illustrious, long-ago relations who have been painters.

CO: John Opie, Royal Academician.

MN: Yeah. I used to be desirous about this balancing act or double occupation that you just’ve held for a while, each as photographer of the marginalised and “Catherine Opie: American Photographer”. Do you assume that, having some sort of linkage, there was already a sense of, “I do have a place in this mainstream story of art history”?

“I think that every place is the wrong place for me. It was for a really long time. I think to be settled as a human being is an incredibly hard thing” – Catherine Opie

CO: It was extra about how historical past is constructed past artwork historical past. It’s about who will get to be seen, who doesn’t. Choosing Holbein to make my very own royal portraits, and never do Nan Goldin work or Jack Pierson’s or Wolfgang Tillmans’ or the identical sort of work that was being performed alongside me, was to say, “Hey, we are royalty too. What is celebrity within this culture? Who gets to be imaged within this culture?” Maybe that goes again to the truth that I grew up with John Opie work in my home from the Royal Academy.

MN: I used to be desirous about Eileen Myles’s poem, An American Poem, the place they are saying, my secret’s lastly out – I used to be hiding as a poor dyke however the fact is I’m a Kennedy … in Eileen’s case, as far as I do know, there isn’t a John Opie or Kennedy within the background. But I used to be considering of the bravado essential to say, “These are the portraits that matter.”

CO: You surprise if it comes from privilege in that approach. It’s an fascinating query, and I’ve considered it lots as a result of I come from a really outdated American household on each side. My father owned the most important political-marketing campaign assortment in American historical past. I grew up understanding American politics by means of the illustration of marketing campaign materiality, together with my O-P Craft field proper over right here, my dad’s field – that is Abraham Lincoln’s loss of life ribbon.

MN: What? No.

CO: Yeah. This is the stuff that I grew up with as a child. I had all the unique Lincoln ferrotypes, I had George Washington’s authentic marketing campaign button in my family. All of this provides you an infinite quantity of fabric as a younger youngster to consider what illustration is, and you actually start to unpack it since you’re studying it by means of American historical past. My dad was obsessed along with his marketing campaign assortment. He began it in highschool. There was no eBay. Collectors would meet up across the nation and undergo issues collectively.

MN: Well, the whole lot makes much more sense. Forget John Opie. There’s your dad.

CO: There’s Bill Opie. Yeah, O-P Craft was a household firm in Sandusky, Ohio. We additionally owned the American Crayon Company partly. My mom’s household from Seneca Falls goes all the way in which again to colonial days of being abolitionists. My father’s household have been slaveholders. I come from 1690. 

MN: No latest immigrants that you realize of?

CO: Zero. I’m extremely American, with an intense data of American historical past. My work vacillates in all these methods, from the landscapes to the portraits to the way in which one would map out a marketing campaign id. Maybe I’ve simply been campaigning this complete time for historical past, one may say. Not that I’ve ever stated these phrases earlier than. But I’ve this actually fascinating, wealthy historical past. John Opie of the Royal Academy, who was finest associates with Sir Joshua Reynolds. My uncle, additionally John Opie, is a painter – that’s considered one of his work – and he’s married to my Aunt Sue, who’s the sculptor of all these bronzes you see. My dad didn’t need me to be an artist. He made me get my actual property licence after I was 18. 

MN: That’s actually humorous. And you probably did?

CO: I did, yeah, and I most likely can be fairly good at promoting homes.

MN: I’ve little doubt.

CO: My dad would at all times inform my Uncle John, “The reason Cathy is successful as an artist is because I taught her business.”

MN: Right, due to that actual property licence. I used to be considering, I really like your soccer gamers sequence [High School Football, 2007–09]. It’s humorous, I lately printed this mini e-book that has to do with Taylor Swift – I’ll simply again up a bit of to say that The New York Times ran an article about Swift and poetry when her album The Tortured Poets Department got here out. They have been interviewing poets they usually interviewed Eileen Myles and I knew they most likely reached out to Eileen considering that as a result of Taylor is that this straight white femme icon Eileen would take her down.

CO: Well, they at all times choose the dyke to take down the billionaire straight woman.

MN: But the factor is that they missed, as a result of Eileen was like, “I think she’s our people. I feel a lot of kinship here.” They missed partly, I feel, as a result of they presumed that the marginalised have the identical stance towards the mainstream that the mainstream has towards the marginalised, which is considered one of non-understanding, non-kinship. In speaking to folks about my piece on Swift, some mainstream of us have been like, “Why would you, of all people, be writing about this?” And I felt in a bizarre approach affronted, like, “All of it can belong to me. Why would this be off limits to me?” So – again to the soccer gamers! I don’t see any actual departure after I take a look at your work between these and that and the opposite. I don’t really feel you do both.

CO: No, and the query that freaks folks out is why would I feel {that a} highschool soccer participant is weak? It’s like, you’ve picked one thing that’s so safe, so profoundly iconic, wrapped up in concepts about masculinity. But we’re not speaking about them as weak once they’re going off to struggle, to Afghanistan and Iraq, and that’s an issue for us inside our society. What is iconic and safe will not be essentially that safe, relying on how our authorities is utilizing these our bodies. In the identical approach that the queer get together wasn’t secure when [Senator] Jesse Helms was holding up the Robert Mapplethorpe pictures [on the floor of the Senate in 1989], a 17-year-old who’s about able to graduate, who has no prospect for school and is from an impoverished household the place his solely selection goes into the navy, why would I not consider that as a vulnerability? And additionally, simply the awkwardness of their our bodies – it finally ends up being human. If I can get everyone to grasp a bigger thought of how we section our societies – “I can’t talk to this person,” or, “I don’t want to know that person because they’re like that.” 

After I made High School Football I labored on Girlfriends, which your accomplice Harry was in. I simply needed to return to dyke masculinity. I needed to speak about butchness and butch need. After three years of chasing round younger highschool boys I simply wanted to get again to myself.

MN: What’s your rule set for commissions as of late?

CO: A number of occasions I’ve not taken commissioned portraits as a result of I don’t consider of their political ideas. In the editorial work, early on I realised I used to be getting used because the dyke physique to upset – sort of such as you have been saying about Eileen. But you’re not going to make use of my id to get a portrait that received’t be humane. Because each single portrait of mine, it doesn’t matter what, goes to be holding this sort of internal-external house.

MN: Why would folks fee you considering that you just have been going to be the upset or the mockery?

CO: That occurred lots within the Nineties. Spin journal despatched me to Matthew Hale’s home. He’s in jail now, however he was one of many main white supremacists. I ended up photographing him on the sting of his childhood mattress, as a result of he nonetheless had his twin mattress in his household house. But I needed to stroll over the Star of David into the Hitler room, and I feel that Spin thought, “She’ll take an Arbus portrait.” But the factor that folks didn’t perceive about me is I’m not Arbus.

MN: I used to be within the Joan Didion piece you included within the catalogue, On the Road. I questioned in case you’d inform me about your emotions about Didion. Also there’s this chorus within the piece that’s being requested over and over – “Where are we heading?” I’m certain with you, like myself, almost each interview one does, folks need to know, “What do you think of our moment and where are we heading?” I needed to ask you about this crucial to take that temperature. 

CO: Well, I began studying Didion in highschool in California. I had superb public college highschool lecturers. This one literature and poetry instructor by the title of Frank Barone at Poway High would have us all sit in a circle round this useless log that grew one little piece of life out of it … This is the Seventies in Southern California, nevertheless it’s cow nation. You can journey a horse to highschool and put it within the steady behind the varsity, actually. It was a 600 graduating class in 1979, however nothing was constructed round there but. It was simply loopy. Barone had us studying Didion and all these superb thinkers. The approach that Didion wrote simply sunk into me. What she mapped out with language for me was the concrete risk of talking one’s fact in anyone given second. But it wasn’t, “This is how you should be.” It was, “This is just how I’m presenting my observations” – and people observations are extremely photographic by way of how she writes. She writes in a approach that you could really feel, that you could see, and she or he grew to become a hero of mine. Her written phrase was at all times my fact in a bizarre approach.

MN: Did you observe it during to the top?

CO: All the way in which by means of to the top. Didion’s the one portrait that I by no means received to make. It was an important portrait I ever needed to make. I do know Susan Traylor [a longtime friend of Didion’s late daughter, Quintana] rather well. Susan tried for years, gallerists tried for years. And then when Juergen Teller did that trend advert with Didion, and it wasn’t me having the ability to {photograph} Didion, I used to be like, “Are you fucking kidding me?” Another one on my checklist for portraits was [the American artist] Roni Horn – Juergen did this superb portrait of Roni along with her shirt open, and I used to be like, “Fuck you, Juergen Teller!” It’s fascinating, there are these folks that when they’ve been photographed by one other individual in a sure approach, then you definitely’re out, you don’t chase after them.

MN: Do you make that means out of individuals not doing it? Like when Didion’s not doing a portrait, do you make a story out of why? 

CO: No. I’ve one portrait of Didion and it’s hilarious. We simply occurred to be on the Met on the identical time for the Arbus present. All of a sudden, across the nook comes Didion in a wheelchair pushed by Susan, and I pull out my digital camera and get an image of her. But in the meantime, the safety guard on the Met is like this along with his hand, so there’s this hand, with little frail Didion within the wheelchair. It won’t ever be used. But there aren’t lots of people that I’ve needed to {photograph} that I haven’t been capable of.

MN: I feel a lot occurs in transmission from era to era. You want feminine, for lack of a greater phrase, titans, who instruct you or level you in the direction of various things. I used to be desirous about this after I was taking a look at your work … Now I’m feeling bizarrely teary. When I used to be arising, the work of so many homosexual males was actually vital to me as a author. Obviously, I used to be connecting to loads of explicit issues that mattered. But it wasn’t till I met Eileen after I was 19 that I let within the whoosh of dykedom … And as soon as it got here in – and also you have been a part of that – there was a lot transmitted to me, like, “Hey, this all really matters. Cathy Opie really matters.” And then I used to be capable of grow to be a distinct sort of author or feminist. You making these folks well-known in a approach by photographing them, it does impute royalty to an entire scene. 

CO: The touching factor is what has occurred generationally now. Those early portraits have been performed within the early 90s. At MASP [São Paulo Museum of Art], when I’ve a younger 14-year-old trans individual come as much as me with their mother and say, “Thank you so much for your history and for seeing, because I wouldn’t be as comfortable in the world without your imagery,” that does make you cry. You actually do really feel such as you contributed one thing to any individual’s precise wellbeing.

MN: Do you get loads of that? When I grew up all of us hailed these individuals who made queer concept for us, who made queer life extra seen and attainable. And but over the previous few years I’ve seen a really completely different tone – one which’s at occasions contemptuous of queer elders. At first it was very surprising to me. It took me some time to regulate to the distinction in tone. I adjusted as any good instructor does and tried to grasp the place it was coming from. I feel when individuals are round lengthy sufficient to grow to be establishments they grow to be issues to slay, and folks typically look to slay the tall poppies … and naturally there’s all of the precarity in academia and the commonly ireful political local weather …

CO: Well, that’s actually fraught now. That’s partly why I named my final present at Regen, with the historical past of LA that I used to be doing, concord is fraught. Because we’ve struggles and all this time we’re considering that we moved the needle ahead. And then it’s an enormous scratch on the document, to make use of the analogy of analogue. It was fascinating for me to navigate it up to now few years after I was at UCLA as chair [of the Department of Art], how a lot hurt the Trump administration had performed.

“I recognise, at almost 65, how important it is to let go of things that aren’t working” – Catherine Opie

MN: What 12 months did you retire? 

CO: Two years in the past, proper after the pandemic. I took a 12 months off and did the physique of labor on the Vatican – Walls, Windows and Blood. And then I got here again to chair the division for 2 years and retired straight after that. It was popping out of Covid, popping out of Trump, like, “OK. Well, was that a blip?” But I knew it wasn’t a blip as a result of I had already been monitoring all of this from photographing the early Tea Party march rallies. One of the issues the National Portrait Gallery present does properly is monitor the politics. You not solely have the pope within the window, you even have the ladies from MichFest [Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival] with their cameras, speaking about what it’s to {photograph} butches. The complete present folds on this bigger thought once more of we’re not such a cut up society.

MN: So possibly this hyperlinks again to the second a part of the Didion query of the place are we heading…?

CO: In the story [I included in the catalogue] she’s on a e-book tour along with her daughter, however the wandering could be very a lot how I take into consideration my very own life. As I traverse LA or wherever, there’s a continuing script occurring in my head. So after I’m looking the window and I see a constructing that’s lit a sure approach, I would find yourself saying, “Well, the way that the light is on the windows is a metaphor for this,” and it’s very a lot in the way in which that Didion would take a look at the world, mapping out a sensibility of a bigger construction of our society. 

MN: Is studying an enormous a part of your observe?

CO: Huge. I’m a voracious reader, at all times have been. It was a approach that I may escape as a baby. If everyone else in the home was watching TV, I’d be curled up with a e-book in one other world. Books are secure for me.

MN: So, [Giuffre’s] Nobody’s Girl – which may point out that you just learn extensively.

CO: I learn extensively. I very hardly ever learn concept any extra. Well, I’m an enormous Kim Stanley Robinson reader. I feel he’s one of many extra fascinating writers in regards to the future, and I’ve been studying him since 1982. As quickly as a e-book comes out, I learn it. Same with Octavia Butler. I’m actually concerned about dystopia, however futurist dystopia that’s not sci-fi and planetary issues. I would like it to replicate on the world that we’re residing in. Then I’m an enormous memoir reader. Charles Schulz’s biography was fantastically written, and Schulz was actually vital to me. Walt Disney’s biography helped me perceive what it was visually he was making. These are a approach for me to grasp how they’re as artists, the place it’s not essentially them telling me how I ought to take into consideration their work, nevertheless it’s telling me about this interiority that I may not learn about.

MN: Thinking about biography, you’ve stated a few occasions throughout this dialog, “Now that I’m almost 65 … ” And we have been speaking out in your studio about how whenever you’re within the archive of your individual work, you’ll be able to’t make new work. I keep in mind Eileen saying that the older they get, the extra they really feel like each introduction of them seems like a scanning of the corpse, that they’re being archived for loss of life.

CO: Well, those that have been written about closely, the PhDs are made about your work, dissertations are written everywhere in the world. People are deciphering you in all these alternative ways. I agree, it’s like scanning the corpse in a sure approach.

MN: Tell me, in case you don’t thoughts … I really feel just like the extra well-known one may get, not less than in my expertise, the extra apparent it’s what needs to be protected to make new work or have new ideas … Do you’re feeling like the entire of Cathy Opie must go away?

CO: No – truly she’s coming again out in a extra highly effective approach. I used to be rather more protecting across the time I used to be elevating Oliver and in my marriage with Julie, as a result of Oliver needed to be his personal autonomous human being on the earth. I keep in mind asking him the opposite day, “Oliver, what did you think about the Facebook posts of the Lesbian Cowboy [Opie’s new project]?” He stated, “Huh.” I stated, “What?” And he goes, “How far are you taking this, Mom?” And I stated, “I’m taking it really, really far.” Meaning that I’ll discover each facet of what the Lesbian Cowboy means as a physique of labor. It’s not going to be a present till 2028. So, “You might get embarrassed by your mother.”

MN: Sadly, there’s most likely no statute of limitations on being embarrassed by one’s mom. When we’re gone, our kids will stay embarrassed by us.

CO:Yeah, there are various things. One is whenever you’re making your work about your group and your folks and also you aren’t proven in museums or something but – that’s a completely completely different approach you’re working. Then, rapidly, you grow to be this different individual and issues are stated about you, and you need to nearly recalibrate as a result of how are you your individual true self inside different folks’s innovations of you? Because that’s what occurs – they devise issues about you. I’ve grow to be associates with Jane Fonda – we play canasta collectively. She’s grow to be my card-playing buddy and I really like Jane. When I turned 60 we have been having a kind of actually candy teas at her home the place she was emotional and I used to be emotional. I used to be like, “Jane, I really feel like I have to tell my story soon beyond my pictures because people don’t necessarily know who I am. I have this new thing that I want to be fully authentic within my life, and I don’t know what that means within this structure of who I am and what fame does. Can you guide me with that?”

MN: What did she say? I’m dying to know.

CO: Well, Jane stated, “It’s time for you to write your memoir, Cathy, and it’s time for you to be completely truthful about everything in your life because, no matter what, things are going to be written about you. You need control over what you want to say and how you want to say it.”

MN: Is that on the barrelhead then?

CO: I feel so. That’s why I’m studying Nobody’s Girl. 

MN: Would you write it your self completely?

CO: No, I feel I might have a ghostwriter. I’m too insecure as a dyslexic author. Whenever I write quick items I feel folks like my writing. But I’ve such an enormous hang-up nonetheless over being the silly woman, being the woman that was instructed to play board video games in highschool as a result of I used to be regarded as not mentally succesful. I feel I nonetheless have too many hang-ups about that. A ghostwriter may additionally assist the discombobulated nature that I might write it in – however I additionally assume possibly that may be fascinating, for my story to be about discombobulation. Because tales don’t have a starting, a center and an finish essentially. 

MN: I simply taught this Roland Barthes e-book referred to as The Preparation of the Novel – lectures that he gave on the Collège de France. It’s a fantasy, however he’s sort of saying, “What if I were to embark upon writing a novel after all these years of doing this other kind of work? What would change me into a novelist?” What’s so transferring in regards to the first few lectures is that he’s speaking in regards to the notion of the “vita nova”, beginning a brand new life. He says, “Now that I’m 60, I feel like the life I start now might be my last life. What’s my ‘vita nova’ going to be?” 

CO: I ought to learn that.

MN: It’s actually stunning. But what introduced me to tears whereas I used to be instructing it’s that, throughout the time he was giving these lectures, he will get hit by a laundry van within the streets of Paris – he was heading again to the faculty after lunch to examine on some particulars of an upcoming seminar. His biographer says he was seeking to safe a projector – it’s such a professorial factor to be, like, “I just want to double-check on the tech.” So he dies at 64 in the midst of this. But my first thought was 60 appears awfully younger to say it’s your final life.

CO: No, I feel you do assume like that. Have you turned 60 but?

MN: No, I haven’t. 

CO: Oh, it’s fascinating. I used to be shocked. I didn’t assume that it was going to be an enormous factor. And then all of these items occurred in my life after I was 60. I made a decision to finish my marriage. I made a decision to kick my older brother, who was my abuser my complete life, out of my life. I stated, “I’m never speaking to you again. You’re done now.” And after I did that I made a decision, 4 months later, to finish my marriage. So 60 ended up being lots – “Whoa, what is with 60?” I went to Jane. “Please elder me here because I don’t have a mother to talk to” – not that she’s useless, she has simply by no means been that sort of mom. Sorry, Mom, I really like you however you’re not that sort of mom. Jane stated, “Cathy, you have to start writing it all down.” But it’s fascinating as a result of the factor for me, Maggie, is my work is my novels, my pictures are my novels. But it’s a kind of clichéd moments the place the image doesn’t have a thousand phrases, truly. I by no means needed to speak about my story due to how folks remake your story. But I’m feeling the necessity to begin speaking. I do know it can begin out with mowed grass. That’s what I’ve determined – that it’s in regards to the odor of grass being mowed in the summertime.

MN: I’m very enthusiastic about this for you. We may finish right here as a result of it’s like your “vita nova” is starting. As I instructed my college students the opposite day, “Now, all I have to do is not get hit by a laundry van on my way home.” It’s humorous as a result of Barthes additionally talks about realizing what your abilities are by the point you’re 60, and he says a phrase I can’t get out of my head – one thing to the impact of, “After that, your work becomes managed depletion.”

CO: Managed depletion. Wow.

MN: But not in a tragic approach.

CO: No, in a extremely profound approach. Maybe you belief your work another way. Maybe that’s what I’m studying being nearly 65, that the previous 4 years have been an unimaginable reflection on what I tolerate and what I don’t tolerate any extra, and what’s the order of my life going ahead. Because so many issues have modified up to now 4 years, with my youngster being grown and never having the 21-year marriage that I had with Julie, and different issues.

MN: Do you assume LA stays part of it?

CO: Very a lot, however Three Rivers [a village in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada] is increasingly a component. I’ve that tumbler home of mine in Three Rivers … Have you ever been up there?

MN: I by no means went. I at all times needed to go.

CO: Well, you’re welcome. I received a glass home on seven and a half acres. That’s the place the Lesbian Cowboy lives, and she or he’s popping out. Her persona is popping out. And then there’s the opposite persona, which is the Witchiepoo lesbian nature photographer. I’ve determined I don’t essentially know easy methods to be Cathy Opie any extra. In the identical approach that I used to be discovering who I used to be within the Nineteen Eighties and Nineties by means of persona play, I’ve sort of determined to speak in regards to the world by means of a persona.

MN: “The old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now – ”

CO: “Because she’s dead.”

Catherine Opie: To Be Seen runs on the National Galleries of Scotland from 8 August to 1 November.

All pictures © Catherine Opie, courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, London and Seoul; and Thomas Dane Gallery, London

This story options within the Spring/Summer 2026 challenge, marking 25 years of AnDifferent Magazine, on sale internationally on 12 March 2026.