Drag, gridiron and kids in tutus: America through the lens of Catherine Opie – in pictures

Since the 1980s the US photographer has preserved queer lives through portraiture, challenged ideas about the nuclear home and documented moments of solidarity and uncertainty in her work, which is often touching and shocking. As her first survey in Australia opens, she shares the stories behind her most famous photos

All images courtesy of Catherine Opie, and Regen Projects and Lehmann Maupin

Main image: ‘People also presume so much about me because I made this’ … Catherine Opie’s Self-Portrait/Cutting
 (1993). Photograph: Catherine Opie/Regen Projects

  • Oliver in a Tutu (2004)

    Oliver’s my son. He’s now 21, he’s an art history major and he came out to my wife Julie and I a couple of years ago. He’s a gayby! Oliver really loved dress-up and pink when he was little – and doing laundry. He was constantly going around the house gathering up everything to shove in the washing machine, because he had to do laundry. This just happened to be an outfit he was wearing, I didn’t dress him up! It was a regular afternoon – there he was, the light was perfect and, of course, he was doing laundry.
    A young boy wearing a pink tutu and a silver crown stands on a chair beside a washing machine, looking at the camera and smiling

  • Bo (1994)

    Bo was an alter-ego I had for a while, that only worked with that moustache. Back then, me and my friends would put on moustaches and ride our motorcycles to a lesbian bar in LA and we would offer women rides home. Drag was not really that big then – it was in a certain dyke subculture but not in LA – so they were all like, ‘Ahhh, I don’t know what to do with you!’The moustache went through the wash in my jeans pocket and got ruined, so Bo died. That really disturbed my girlfriend. She was like, ‘But I love Bo!’ We later broke up – maybe she liked Bo more than me!
    Catherine Opie dressed in drag as someone with a moustache with short hair and wearing a flannel vest, blue jeans and black boots

  • Jesse (1995)

    Jesse is my best friend’s niece. This photo made me want to do children’s portraits. I photographed Jesse again when she was 22 as part of a body of work about iconic butch dykes because Jesse had come out then.I love working with kids. I was a camp counsellor and was going to be a kindergarten teacher. I think the worst thing that photographers do with children is make them look happy. They should just let children be. Everyone is taught to force smiles for portraits. I always say to kids, ‘Do you walk around the world like that? All you have to do right now is just be with me.’
    A girl aged about seven or eight with no shirt on and wearing a backwards baseball cap and shorts and looking at camera with a green backdrop

  • Divinity Fudge (1997)

    Divinity is a great performance artist and drag act. She came to the studio in that outfit – it was just too good. She used to be part of this weird, ad-libbed queer soap opera that would be performed in Silverlake once a month. She was also one of the most rocking DJs for queer clubs in LA. But she’s most famous for her work with artist Ron Athey, who cut patterns into her skin for a work reflecting on Aids.
    A drag performer wearing leopard print bra and matching skirt and high heels in front of a yellow-orange backdrop

  • Self-Portrait/Cutting (1993)

    I’ve made a lot of work in my life and a lot of times it just always circles back to this self-portrait. People also presume so much about me because I made this. My son, who is an art history major, said to me the other day: ‘I spent this semester studying you in school and if you weren’t my mom, I think I’d be scared of you.’ So much has been written about this photo. There have been dissertations around it. It is a really important work. I’m so glad that I made it. But it also overshadows 30 years of work. People go right for it because it is challenging.
    Catherine Opie standing with her back to the camera and on her back there are bleeding cuts that form stick-figure shapes of two women holding hands in front of a house with the sun behind a could in the sky

  • Self-Portrait/Nursing (2004)

    Self-Portrait/Nursing is not as challenging as Self- Portrait/Cutting. But they are so linked together because they are about my longing for domesticity. I wanted home, family, a wife, a child – I wanted all of that so badly. So I cut that on my back in 1993. And then a decade later, I have my baby and I’m nursing him. For the world, they say something about queer representation. But for me, they’re all about my desire and my longing to have a child.
    Catherine Opie sitting naked on a chair and nursing her son in front of a red backdrop

  • Melissa & Lake, Durham, North Carolina (1998)

    I bought an RV and traveled through the US for three and a half months. I would go into towns and lecture as an artist to pay for gas. I was shooting with an 8x10 camera then because Moma’s photography collection at the time included lots of contemporary photographers who were shooting 8x10 – there was an incredible continuation of visibility of heterosexuality in that work and I wanted to use the same format to photograph lesbians, to create that history. We have 420 anti-LGBTQ laws being introduced in the US right now – homophobia is still there.
    A same-sex couple in a bedroom, one with their hand on the other's hip and the other with their hand on the other's shoulder, both facing the camera with clear, serious expression

  • Kaine (2007)

    Kaine is from Churchpoint, Louisiana, where my wife grew up. I had 24 nieces and nephews, and all the boys played football – that’s what you do in a small town! Maybe looking at this you presume that these young guys are assholes. Right? Especially as a lesbian who went through high school being tortured by young men. But stereotypes are problematic. These guys are as masculine and as vulnerable as they come. They’re also potentially going off to die in Afghanistan and Iraq – we were at war at the time. I really felt for them.
    A young man wearing a gridiron uniform with big shoulder pads and holding his helmet under one arm and looking at the camera, on a football field

  • Rocco (2012)

    Rocco Kayiatos is a really interesting, cool person. He co-founded Original Plumbing, a really important early zine for trans men. A good friend of mine was making a documentary about Rocco and Amos [Mac, co-founder of Original Plumbing] and they were in talks to do a reality TV show that didn’t happen. My friend asked if I would do the promo shots. But after meeting Rocco I asked if he would formally sit for me. I love the lighting – it falls right on ‘Tender Hearted’.
    Transgender man Rocco Kayiatos sitting in front of a black backdrop and looking at the camera as light falls on him and his tattoos, which included the words 'Tender Hearted' across his chest

  • Thelma & Duro (2017)

    Thelma Golden runs the Studio Museum in Harlem and has probably done more for young curators and artists of color than any other person. This portrait is of her and her husband Duro Olowu, who is an amazing designer who lives in London. I wanted to do a royal portrait of them so I shot it in London. When Megan and Harry announced that they were getting married, the National Portrait Gallery in London put this portrait up in the Tudor room. So it actually functioned the way I wanted to!
    Portrait of Thelma Golden, who is standing dressed in a beautiful dress of black and coloured prints of roses, beside Duro Olowu, who is sitting in a chair wearing a navy suit

  • Untitled #4 (monument/monumental) (2020)

    This monument of Robert E Lee in Richmond, Virginia has now been removed. I’m interested in questions around land – whose land is this? What is our relationship to land? Land is a place of memory. It’s a place of a ritual, it’s a place of sacrifice. I did a large body of work in 2020 around Black Lives Matter, but this is part of a sequence that serves as a poem to the moment. The sun has not set on racism in the US. Just like homophobia, it’s very alive and people are fighting for it. People stormed the fricking Capitol for it.
    Monument of Robert E Lee riding a horse atop a pillar that is covered in BLM graffiti

  • Untitled #7 (Swamps) (2019)

    Landscapes are really important to me. How do we think of nature when everybody, you and me included, go to a national park, pull out our phone, take a picture and post it on Instagram? All my work traverses the relationship between nature and community, identity and politics. During the Trump administration, it was constant rhetoric about drain the swamp. But swamps are really precious ecosystems and they’re very vulnerable. This is Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia – it is a very famous swamp where a lot of the movies were filmed, such as Creature from the Black Lagoon.
    A swamp on a still but overcast day with trees reflected in the water
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