17.7.1: Case Study- Catherine Opie — Portraiture, Queer Visibility, and the Right to Be Seen

Catherine Opie, Being and Having, Museum of Modern Art.

Her early series Being and Having from 1991 is especially important. In these portraits, Opie photographed friends from the lesbian and queer community in Los Angeles wearing fake mustaches, tattoos, and masculine-coded accessories. The Guggenheim notes that Being and Having and her later Portraits series depicted friends in the lesbian and gay community in Los Angeles while combining traditional portrait conventions with subcultural signs of identity.¹ The images are direct, frontal, and formally controlled. They borrow from the history of studio portraiture while refusing the expectation that gender should appear natural, fixed, or easily readable.

This is one of Opie’s major contributions to contemporary portraiture. Her work makes identity visible as performance without making it seem false. Gender, style, posture, tattooing, costume, and self-presentation become languages through which the sitter claims space. The fake mustache is not simply a prop. It becomes a challenge to the viewer’s assumptions about masculinity, femininity, and the visual codes through which bodies are recognized. Opie shows that identity is not less real because it is performed. Performance is one of the ways identity becomes socially legible.

The formal language of Opie’s portraits is crucial. Her images often use the clarity and stillness of classical portraiture. Sitters face the camera with composure. Backgrounds are carefully controlled. The portraits carry a sense of monumentality, even when the subjects come from communities historically treated as marginal, deviant, or invisible. This visual seriousness matters. Opie does not ask viewers to look at queer life as spectacle. She asks them to look with the same attentiveness traditionally granted to rulers, patrons, saints, and cultural heroes.

Her Portraits series from the 1990s deepens this strategy. These works present members of queer, leather, and BDSM communities with an extraordinary balance of vulnerability and authority. The portraits are intimate, but not voyeuristic. They reveal bodies marked by tattoos, piercings, scars, clothing, and chosen forms of self-fashioning, yet they do not reduce those bodies to difference. Instead, Opie presents them as specific people whose identities are carefully constructed, deeply lived, and worthy of representation.

This distinction is essential for a chapter section on performing the self. Opie’s work does not treat self-invention as superficial. It shows how self-presentation can be a survival strategy, a community language, and a form of political self-definition. For queer communities, especially those shaped by histories of stigma and exclusion, the ability to appear on one’s own terms carries real significance. Portraiture becomes a method of civic and cultural recognition.

Catherine Opie, Self-Portrait/Cutting, 1993, Whitney Museum

Opie’s self-portraits make this politics even more direct. Works such as Self-Portrait/Cutting and Self-Portrait/Pervert are among her most discussed images because they bring together pain, identity, vulnerability, and representation in a highly charged way. In Self-Portrait/Cutting, Opie presents her back, into which a childlike image of two women holding hands in front of a house has been cut. In Self-Portrait/Pervert, she sits facing the viewer, hooded, pierced, and marked with the word “Pervert” cut into her chest. These works are not simply confessional. They confront the violence of social labeling and transform the marked body into an image of agency.

The National Portrait Gallery’s 2026 exhibition Catherine Opie: To Be Seen describes her photographs as making visible queer communities, mentors, collaborators, children, surfers, high school football players, political crowds, and Opie herself through self-portraiture.² This range is important because Opie’s work is not limited to one version of queer identity. Her portraits move from subculture to family, from private intimacy to public assembly, from personal vulnerability to collective visibility. Together, they argue that queer life is not a single type of image. It includes friendship, desire, domesticity, protest, parenting, style, grief, humor, toughness, and care.

Catherine Opie, Self Portrait/Nursing, 2004, Guggenheim Museum.

Opie’s domestic images are especially important in this regard. Her photographs of queer families and home spaces expand the political meaning of portraiture. The home is not simply private. For communities excluded from dominant definitions of family, domestic representation can become a political claim. To photograph queer parenting, chosen family, and intimate domestic life is to challenge the assumption that legitimacy belongs only to conventional family structures. Opie’s work insists that love, kinship, and belonging are also matters of visibility.

At the same time, her portraits avoid easy idealization. They do not simply replace negative stereotypes with perfect images of acceptance. Many of Opie’s photographs hold tension: tenderness and toughness, vulnerability and theatricality, beauty and discomfort, intimacy and confrontation. This complexity is part of their force. She allows her subjects to be neither symbols of victimhood nor simplified icons of empowerment. They remain human, specific, and unresolved.

Opie’s practice also connects portraiture to community. Her portraits are often made from within the worlds she photographs, rather than from a distant outsider position. This does not remove all questions of power, but it changes the ethical structure of the work. The camera becomes a tool for recognition among people who share social, cultural, or emotional ties. In a 2024 MoMA interview, Opie described portraiture in relation to queer liberation and the responsibility of looking closely at the world around her.³ This sense of care is central to her photographic method.

Her work also helps distinguish between visibility and exposure. Exposure can make someone vulnerable by placing them under unwanted scrutiny. Visibility, in Opie’s work, is more deliberate. It is shaped through collaboration, form, pose, and context. The subject does not simply appear; the subject holds the frame. This is one reason her portraits feel so forceful. They are not only images of people being looked at. They are images of people returning the gaze.

This returning gaze matters because portraiture has often objectified people marked as different. Opie reverses that history by giving her subjects composure and presence. The viewer may look, but the sitter also looks back, or otherwise occupies the image with such confidence that the viewer becomes aware of their own act of looking. The portrait becomes an ethical encounter.

In the context of twenty-first-century photography, Opie’s work remains deeply relevant because questions of gender, sexuality, visibility, and bodily autonomy continue to shape public life. Her images help students understand that identity is not merely personal. It is produced within systems of recognition and exclusion. To be seen can be affirming, dangerous, intimate, public, and political all at once.

Catherine Opie demonstrates that portraiture is not a passive record of identity. It is a space where identity is negotiated and claimed. Her photographs show that the self may be performed, but that performance can be truthful. They show that the body may be marked by culture, violence, desire, and choice, but it can also become a site of resistance. Most importantly, her work argues that visibility is not simply about appearing in front of a camera. It is about being granted the full complexity of presence.

Footnotes

1. “Catherine Opie.” The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation, www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/catherine-opie.
2. “Catherine Opie: To Be Seen.” National Portrait Gallery, www.npg.org.uk/whatson/exhibitions/2026/catherine-opie-to-be-seen.
3. Catherine Opie, “What to Do When the World’s on Fire: A Conversation with Catherine Opie.” Magazine, Museum of Modern Art, 22 May 2024.