The Bensussen Guest Lecture Series in Art  

welcomes

Photographer Catherine Opie

The Structure of Photography

Catherine Opie will discuss her work from the past six years, starting with her critique of the utopian dream through the lens of an artist and arsonist. She will then explore her journey through the swamps of the South, paired with stop-motion animated political collages, and her road trip during COVID isolation in 2020, where she examined the country's response to the climate of racism and politics. During a residency at the American Academy in Rome in 2021, Opie's access to the nearly empty Vatican—thanks to the pandemic—allowed her to immerse herself in the architecture of the museums, gaze out of the windows, study the tapestries, and examine the outer walls. More recently, she traveled through the mountains of Norway, seeking the elusive blue light that she remembered from a previous visit. Throughout these diverse bodies of work, Opie weaves together ideas about the structure of photography and the ways she uses the camera to witness and interpret the world around us.

Catherine Opie is one of the most important photographers of her generation. Her subjects have included early seminal portraits of the LGBTQ+ community, the architecture of Los Angeles’ freeway system, mansions in Beverly Hills, Midwestern icehouses, high school football players, California surfers, and abstract landscapes of National Parks, among others. She was a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow recipient and the Robert Mapplethorpe Resident in Photography at the American Academy in Rome for 2021. She has exhibited at international venues such as Guggenheim Museum in New York, The Photographer’s Gallery in London, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark. Opie was a professor of photography at UCLA for 25 years. She lives and works in Los Angeles.