What defines a person? Which forces shape individual identity? How can social attributions be challenged, and which alternative ways of living can be imagined and enacted? These questions form a central point of departure in the work of Catherine Opie. Since the early 1990s, Opie has developed a complex oeuvre encompassing photography as well as film, artists’ books, and installations.

Born in 1961 in Sandusky, Ohio, and now based in Los Angeles, Opie works across three foundational photographic genres—landscape, portraiture, and documentary. Rather than treating these as fixed categories, she approaches them as frameworks for an ongoing inquiry into visibility and representation, and into photography as a practice of witnessing. Her work brings together documentary precision and artistic intention with poetic depth, ranging from her early portraiture of her queer community, informed by the Renaissance tradition of painting, to series that explore landscape as a resonant space for identity, hope, and trauma, and to powerful documentations of social movements such as Black Lives Matter and protest marches during the presidency of Donald Trump.

A perceptive observer of social life, Opie draws on the legacy of socially engaged documentary photography of the twentieth century—shaped by figures including Lewis Hine, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, and Dorothea Lange—while subjecting this tradition to a thoughtful and empathetic contemporary rearticulation.

On the occasion of her solo exhibition in Kassel, The Pause That Dreams Against Erasure, the Neue Nationalgalerie, American Academy in Berlin, and Fridericianum invited audiences to a joint event with the artist. In her lecture, Opie reflected on her artistic practice, the development of her work, and the social questions that continue to inform her practice today. The lecture was followed by a Q&A, offering space for dialogue and discussion.

In cooperation with the Fridericianum and Neue Nationalgalerie.

Video: artbeats