Crystal Mason

Since the late 1980s, Catherine Opie’s work has expanded the human visual imagination by depicting communities, bodies and identities that were historically marginalised or pathologised, and by questioning the norms that determine who can be seen, named or represented.

These five photographs belong to the Portraits series, a collection of 50 colour portraits taken between 1993 and 1997, featuring members of San Francisco’s leather community, drag queens, performance artists, transgender people and close friends. Opie presents her models by their real names, firstly situating them in the wake of Lewis Hine’s photographic documentary work and secondly in the tradition of classical portraiture — in particular, Hans Holbein the Younger’s — whose frontal compositions, restrained gestures and rich detail she adopts to construct an aesthetic of dignity, intimacy and permanence. Thus, these portraits reinscribe their subjects in a visual imaginary historically reserved for white, heterosexual, bourgeois men, legitimising their right to exist and be intelligible within the social and symbolic framework