Over her career, Catherine Opie (Born 1961 in Sandusky, OH) has created a defining and powerful body of photographic work. In the mid-1980s Opie began documenting the United States—its landscape and inhabitants—capturing a vast array of subjects, from freeways and football fields to the S/M community, surfers, children, and her neighbors and friends in South Central Los Angeles. Her straightforward approach to photography produces singular images that capture such complex aspects of human relations as intimacy, trust, and belief.
Elizabeth forms part of a series of portraits by Opie depicting those close to her, including other artists (Matthew Barney, Glenn Ligon, and Kara Walker among them). Opie has long made work involving her immediate community, and this new series marks both the continuity and expansion of her circle. Elizabeth features the choreographer and performer Elizabeth Streb, known for her experimental, athletically challenging contemporary dance. Opie has posed Streb against a black drop cloth and uses theatrical lighting to create a formally classical portrait that recalls seventeenth-century painting with allegorical dimensions. The arrangement renders certain details in extraordinarily intimate detail, as the eye is drawn to the sitter’s face, hand, necklace, and the floral motif on her shirt, which seem to emerge from utter darkness. In this series, Opie describes these creative individuals with a potency and focus that has become a defining feature of her oeuvre.