Catherine Opie
Angela (crotch grab)
In Catherine Opie’s Angela (crotch grab), the subject’s hand is plunged aggressively beneath the waistband of jeans. The pose is evocative of masculinity in its forcefulness and posture, yet as the title reveals, the figure in the photograph is a woman. In this and countless other works, Opie seeks to display gender, sexuality, identity, and subjectivity in terms unique to each individual.
Since the 1990s, Catherine Opie has been recognized for her use of documentary photography to address issues of community and queerness, and the ways in which identity is shaped by architecture. Particularly resonant during the Culture Wars of the 1980s and early 1990s—a time in which the religious right tried to impose itself as a political force and cultural censor—Opie’s photographs privilege the representation of specific communities, whether the LGBT, teenagers, surfers, football players, or her group of friends who engage in sexual role playing, tattooing, and piercing.