| For those familiar with the S&M self-portraiture and photos of trans-gendered subjects she produced during the early 90s, Catherine Opie’s show, “American Cities,” on view at Barbara Gladstone might come as a surprise. Prominently featured in high-profile exhibitions dealing with queer culture such as the Guggenheim’s “Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose: Gender Performance in Photography” (1997), her artistic persona is still closely linked to her portraits of drag kings and queens. In Gladstone’s show of her urban photographs, however, Opie’s abiding engagement with identity politics appears in a different guise: through her career-long documentation of the built environment. |  |
Catherine Opie Focuses Her Lens on America – Colleen Becker
For those familiar with the S&M self-portraiture and photos of trans-gendered subjects she produced during the early 90s, Catherine Opie’s show, “American Cities,” on view at Barbara Gladstone might come as a surprise. Prominently featured in high-profile exhibitions dealing with queer culture such as the Guggenheim’s “Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose: Gender Performance in Photography” (1997), her artistic persona is still closely linked to her portraits of drag kings and queens. In Gladstone’s show of her urban photographs, however, Opie’s abiding engagement with identity politics appears in a different guise: through her career-long documentation of the built environment.
“American Cities” brings together images from four distinct locations: Los Angeles, St. Louis, Minneapolis, New York and Chicago. These sites are characterized not only through her spectacular shots of major monuments, such as the St. Louis Arch—seen here not as a gateway, but as mere backdrop to the more prosaic structure of a railway bridge, but also the revealing of hidden nooks. Her portrayal of the decayed foundations of some unnamed St. Louis structure, for example, evokes not the industrial age in which such Midwestern cities grew and thrived, but rather the crumbling beauty of 19th century ruin of Romanticism; perhaps indicative of its status as a once-great boomtown now in decline.
Shots of the obscure, like the quizzical underground intersection at Chicago’s Wacker Drive, are joined by those of the banal such as Los Angeles mini-malls and Minneapolis skyways. Typifying life in the chilly North, where skywalks shield against extreme weather conditions, Opie’s photographs also communicate the cold and arid atmosphere of Minneapolis’ abandoned streets. Similarly, Los Angeles’ multiculturalism is apparent within the amalgam of the nearly abandoned strip mall, in which hole-in-the-wall Bar-B-Q and pizza joints occupy opposite ends of the same span of concrete and stucco, a shabby parody of American “melting pot” social ideals.
While black and white images of cities comprise the bulk of the show, the exhibition also includes four large-scale color photos featuring views of Lake Michigan. Like the urban panoramas, these are notable for their blasé presentation—the lake’s blue-green opacity appears as flat and unremarkable as its earthy counterpart: the expansive stretch of the Midwest’s nearly featureless landscape.
Like Opie’s most recent series of photographs, “In and Around Home”—in which she investigates her queer family’s situation within its South-Central Los Angeles neighborhood—the political implications of “American Cities” are contextual and contingent rather than explicit. And, while in her earlier glimpses into queer subculture appeared shocking in their revelation of the extraordinary, in these later works she renders alien the normalcy of omnipresent structures such as mini-malls and skywalks by withholding their social function from view. Unpopulated in Opie’s photos, these are nonetheless America’s cultural artifacts as well as the characteristic landmarks of its cities and towns. Walkways that keep pedestrians from the street, shopping areas that facilitate a lifestyle of segregated, door-to-door isolation, Opie’s photographs leave one wondering if it is precisely the absence of social interaction that typifies American communities.
