In 2010, the Obamas hung a series of photographs of Lake Michigan by photographer Catherine Opie in the White House.
It marked a dramatic passage from the margins of society to the mainstream for Opie, who began her career documenting queer culture at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 80s and 90s.
Her early work, inspired partly by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe's examination of New York's gay BDSM subculture in the 60s and 70s, mixed art and activism in spectacular fashion.
Warning: This article contains images depicting partial nudity and self-cutting that may be challenging for some readers.
A new exhibition at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, Catherine Opie: Binding Ties, presents some of these works in Opie's first major survey in Australia.
More than 50 works from a career spanning four decades appear in the show, including examples of Opie's Renaissance-inspired early portraiture and her more recent images of swampland and blurred landscapes.
Opie received her first camera, a Kodak Instamatic, for her ninth birthday, a gift from her parents.
At this young age, she was inspired by US photographer Lewis Hine, whose ground-breaking photographs of children working in mills, mines and factories helped end child labour in the US. She also counts the photojournalism of Life and Time magazines (copies of which were ever-present in her home, growing up) as a formative influence.
"I wanted to visualise this world we live in and be curious and ask questions and try to make work that would … create a legacy of my own life and the time I was living in," Opie tells Daniel Browning, host of ABC RN's The Art Show.
Opie's family moved from Ohio to California when she was 13, and she set up a darkroom in their new house in San Diego.
Her passion for photography continued throughout high school, and while she considered becoming a kindergarten teacher, she ultimately enrolled in art school.
Opie completed an MFA in 1988 and moved to Los Angeles, where she began photographing her friends in the leather-dyke community.
She initially feared the transgressive nature of her work, including her BDSM-inspired self-portraits, would jeopardise her academic career.
"At that point in my life, I felt life was short — watching friends in their 20s and 30s die [from AIDS] — and it seemed too important not to go ahead and make that work, even though I thought I was … locking myself out of academia," she says.
"[Now] I always say this to young artists: Make what you really believe in and what's really important to you, because life is short."
Fortunately, Opie's academic career flourished. "Twenty-five years at UCLA, and I'm now chair of the art department. It all worked out," she says.
Opie's diverse oeuvre includes photographs of depopulated landscapes, urban panoramas, Californian surfers, high school footballers, and even Elizabeth Taylor's possessions, photographed immediately before the star's death in 2011.
Despite the eclectic nature of her subjects, common threads run through Opie's work: community, identity and humanity.
Self-Portrait/Cutting (1993)
Among Opie's best-known — and best loved — works are her confronting self-portraits dating from the early 90s.
Self-Portrait/Cutting (1993) shows a bare-skinned Opie standing before a background of emerald cloth, facing away from the camera.
Etched into the skin of her back is a childlike drawing, oozing blood, of a house with a puff of smoke rising from the chimney, the sun appearing from behind a cloud, birds in the sky and, in the foreground, two stick figures wearing triangle dresses and holding hands.
"It is about longing; it is about what we're taught as children to draw that represents family," Opie explains.
Opie conceived the idea for the portrait after her first serious breakup, when she found herself beset with longing for a family that seemed out of reach – personally and politically – at that moment in time.
"I kept doodling that image over and over and over again, and finally I said: 'I need to make a piece from this, and I want it to be a cutting,'" she says.
The following year Opie made Self-Portrait/Pervert (1994), in which she appears with a leather bondage hood over her head, with the word 'pervert' etched into her chest in cursive script and 23 hypodermic needles threaded through the skin of each arm.
The "challenging" (her word) image celebrated the leather community at a point when many LGBTQI+ activists were distancing themselves from radical queer subcultures in the push for social acceptability and marriage equality.
The portrait triggered an avalanche of interest in Opie's personal life when it appeared at the 1995 Whitney Biennial – and necessitated a frank conversation with her parents.
But Opie remembers its creation as a joyous occasion.
"I did that image in San Francisco in a studio with 15 of my nearest and dearest … It was kind of a party," Opie recalls.
Both Self-Portrait/Cutting and Self-Portrait/Pervert made strong political statements in an era of conservatism and homophobia.
"Instead of retreating and being closeted, I decided that visibility and representation were important," Opie told UK magazine The Gentlewoman in 2022.
Melissa & Lake, Durham, North Carolina (1998)
In 1998, Opie bought an RV and embarked on a 14,500 kilometre road trip in search of the lesbian domesticity she longed for – and, indeed, had carved into her flesh.
She found it in the homes of queer families she met across America, whose photographs would form the series Domestic (1995-98).
The subjects of these intimate, everyday portraits, shot in living rooms, bedrooms, backyards and kitchens, were diverse in age, geography, ethnicity, and wealth.
For Opie, documenting this under-represented community served several ends: It was a historical correction, an exercise in inclusivity and a political statement.
In 2008, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presented Catherine Opie: American Photographer, a mid-career survey of Opie's work featuring images from the series Domestic, Being and Having (1991) and Portraits (1993–97), which portrayed queer communities in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
"Now, at almost 62 years old, I have these kids come up to me and say: 'I was nine years old when I saw your Guggenheim show, and it made me feel like I could be OK with the rest of my life.' And those are the moments you hold so close to your heart," Opie says.
Today, her activism remains as relevant as ever.
"We have 420 new laws against transsexuals trying to get on the books here in the United States. And I know that homophobia is alive and well in Australia as well," Opie says.
"What we do as artists – I'm an activist and an artist – is make sure that there's work that people can recognise themselves in."
Self Portrait/Nursing (2004)
In 2001, Opie gave birth to her son, Oliver.
"I finally got a full-time teaching job at Yale with health insurance. I thought: 'I'm going to have a baby now.' As I was trying to get pregnant, I met Julie [Burleigh, who Opie later married], and she moved into the house in LA when he was three months old," she says.
In Self Portrait/Nursing, taken in 2004, Opie holds the blond-haired, milky-skinned Oliver to her breast.
A tattoo adorns Opie's right shoulder, and the faint scarification of the word "pervert" is still visible across her chest.
Mother and baby gaze into each other's eyes in a serene scene of maternal love, evoking the classic Madonna and Child of art history.
Domestic bliss doesn't last forever, and Opie and Burleigh separated in 2021 after more than two decades together.
"[It's] just yet another chapter," Opie reflects.
Oliver in a Tutu (2004)
Opie documented her own domestic life for a series titled In and Around Home (2004-05).
In one image in the Heide exhibition, Oliver, a toddler, stands on a chair in front of a washing machine, bathed in golden light.
"Oliver is wearing a USTC shirt, which is a very powerful college football entity here in Los Angeles, but he's [also] wearing a tiara with a pink tutu — and I love the contradiction of that," says Opie.
Of all his mother's works, Oliver's favourite is Self-Portrait/Cutting.
"He said, 'You got to live the dream you cut on your back in 1993, and I'm part of what happened with that dream, so it's the most meaningful to me," Opie told The Gentlewoman.
Kaine (2007)
High school footballers might seem a surprising choice of subject for Opie, given the fabled animosity between jocks and queer kids at high school.
Opie explained her thinking to The New Yorker in 2017: "There's a certain kind of equality I'm trying to create, which is what I believe American democracy is about," she said.
"If I were to pass judgment on, say, football players – that they were the asshole kids who used to beat me up in high school – that's not really looking."
Opie checked her assumptions at the door and approached her subjects – such as Kaine, whose portrait features in the Heide exhibition – with empathy.
"I felt they were as vulnerable as my queer friends in the 90s, because those kids were going off to war in Iraq and Afghanistan if they didn't have money to go to college, or football scholarships.
"They were already being trained to be warriors."
She also discerned an awkwardness in their teenage physiques.
"Not everybody is hypermasculine who is a football player; some of them have really long arms that feel like they are reaching down to their knees, and they look like they could be ploughed over on the field."
Untitled #4 (monument/monumental) (2020)
In 2020, Opie began attending Black Lives Matter protests, "bearing witness" to the unrest that had reignited in the wake of George Floyd's murder in Minneapolis.
At the same time, Opie was faced with the dilemma of how to safely deliver Oliver to college in Louisiana, where classes were proceeding in person despite the COVID-19 pandemic sweeping the nation.
"I looked at Julie, and I said: 'Well … I think it's time for another RV trip. Let's drive him to school … and then let's take off together so I can document what's happening in the US right now,'" Opie recalls.
Opie once again traversed the country in an RV, this time accompanied by Burleigh, to see firsthand what had "happened to these different American cities under the Trump administration, as we were going through another [election] cycle … where he really could have won again," she says.
"I did feel a responsibility — I like to be a good citizen."
In Richmond, Virginia, Opie photographed the controversial monument of Confederate general Robert E Lee, its plinth covered in graffiti by protestors (the monument was moved to a museum in 2021).
The image, taken from ground level, shows the imposing 18-metre monument stretching skyward. The sun, seen behind clouds in the top right corner of the photograph, looks lower in the sky, as if setting.
This impression is a trick of framing, explains Opie: "It appears as if the sun is setting on racism in America, but it certainly hasn't."
Catherine Opie: Binding Ties runs until July 9 at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne.
