Catherine Opie on ‘perverts’, Heated Rivalry and photographing neo-Nazis

Like the rest of us, Catherine Opie has been watching Heated Rivalry. It was her son who first told her about it, while they were spending Christmas together in the UK, where Opie had been preparing for her upcoming exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. When she suggested they watch it together in the hotel room, he protested that it’s not the kind of show you watch with your mother (she protested back: “but I don’t understand, you made me watch Game of Thrones with you!”).

While you can appreciate her son’s hesitancy, for the rest of us, Opie would be a dream companion to watch and dissect the hit television show with, being, as it is, at the intersection of so many of the themes the photographer has grappled with, investigated and deconstructed over her decades-long career. When it comes to questions of masculinity, the performance of gender, family, sexuality and kink; representations of queerness, particularly those missing from the mainstream; the body and identity; power structures; and the cultural landscape of America, she has explored and photographed it all.

Many of these photographs are included in To Be Seen, Opie’s first large museum exhibition in Britain. Opening March 5, the gallery will showcase key works from across her career, spanning portraits of Los Angeles’ 1990s leather dyke scene to high school American football players. While the photographs and their subjects are diverse and wide-ranging, tying them together is fundamental to Opie’s mission of challenging who gets to be seen, and her refusal to compromise her spirit, vision and fight. “They’re constantly trying to take away our right of expression and freedom in different ways,” says Opie. “The great thing about being an artist is embracing your own radicality and living your life as honestly as you can with powers that try to suppress you.” 

Below, we talk to the legendary artist about being a queer elder, her most challenging commissions, and To Be Seen.

Have you been following the story with the US men’s ice hockey team? 

Catherine Opie: Oh, god yes. I wish the men had aligned with the women’s team. I think that would have been really nice in this moment of intense misogyny that’s happening throughout the world, and as women are constantly fighting for their voices. But you know, masculinity and hockey – even though you can have a very popular gay hockey series that the whole world loves, apparently that doesn’t seep in around what it is to be good to women and be feminists. Every man should learn how to be a feminist now and what that really means.

That world of masculinity in sports and athletes is one you’ve explored in your work. 

Catherine Opie: Oh, definitely with high school football. And that’s what I wanted to talk about [with the series] – that this kind of masculinity is just as performed in young men as it is performed in butches. When you look at some of those images of high school football players, the vulnerability comes through, and then the humanity comes through. It was the time when American football players were going off to war in Iraq and Afghanistan if they weren’t getting college scholarships, and I was thinking about it as an extension of the American landscape.

Now I’m doing masculinity in a new character, where I’ve invented the lesbian cowboy who’s going to rewrite the wrongs of masculinity in the history of the American West, because of shows like Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone. If I were ever to be on a panel with Taylor Sheridan, my first question to him would be, ‘Do women need to be beaten to be strong?’

Did those portraits give you insight into how cis straight men perform their gender? Because it’s just as much a performance for them.

Catherine Opie: Well, it is, and that’s the beauty of it, right? Everybody talks about the queer body as this kind of performed thing. But gender is always performed. I would argue that the MAGA women are performing drag queen gender right now. And to their argument about no trans rights – aren’t they transitioning too? What part of their faces is not trans? 

And so again, [it’s about] how we attach these ideas of hypocrisy and language onto ideas of identity. That’s partly what my work does. Is it not only about bearing witness and understanding what community is and visibility and who gets to be seen, but it also hopefully allows these other questions of how we end up creating moments where we have hate in our hearts, where we’re not dealing with everybody from a humanistic level. And so I’m just trying to constantly bring it back to: we are all the same species. And so, can we stop thinking about it in these nationalistic ideas of who belongs and who doesn’t belong?

You started photographing as a way of forging bonds and making friends in new communities. Do you still use photography as a way of creating bonds, now that we’re so divided?

Catherine Opie: I’m utterly in love with my medium of choice. I started it at nine, I’ll be 65 in April and I’ve spent my whole life thinking about this one thing. I think it is important to understand what work does and how to bring people together. Even if I was sent on assignment from the New York Times, and they’d say, ‘Well, you’re going to photograph this anti-abortion kid’ or Matthew Hale for Spin Magazine, who was one of the worst white supremacists. I would get sent to these places, and I think they thought that I would take a Diane Arbus kind of portrait; that there would be some humiliation because they’re sending a leather dyke to go deal with this person. 

But no, I was making [Hale] sit on his childhood bed, which was a twin bed in his parents’ house. Now that was a way of bringing him down, versus looking all powerful in that red room of swastikas. I took him out of that room and made him sit on his childhood bed – and how do we then think about that human being? This human being is still sleeping in a twin-sized childhood bed in his parents’ house with his little Nazi room. Can we, instead of hating him, have a moment of empathy? Are we allowed to do that? Who are we allowed to have empathy for?

How did you approach that sort of assignment? Did you ever think about saying no to any of them?

Catherine Opie: I’ve only said no to one, and I won’t say who it is. I needed to keep making money. You take the jobs because they’re interesting. It makes you a better photographer. Editorial, definitely, is very different from asking my friends to come over to my living room. It makes you better at what you’re doing. But I didn’t really say no because it was so exciting to be asked to photograph for the New York Times Magazine in my 30s that I didn’t really want to turn that down. 

Can you tell me more about the lesbian cowboy work that you’re doing? 

Catherine Opie: She came out of the game Red Dead Redemption. I stole it from my son during the pandemic and got obsessed with it. And then I started really thinking about, well, how are they teaching American history to the mainly young boys who are playing this game? I became really obsessed with what the meaning of this is for young boys. So I decided instead of being Arthur Morgan, who’s the protagonist, that it would be the lesbian cowboy and she would rewrite the wrongs of masculinity in the American West to align it through a feminist voice. 

I’m hoping to get people like Kristin Stewart or Eileen Myles on to do a talk show. I want to bring all of these amazing people in on this talk show where the lesbian cowboy asks them questions about the history of masculinity and how do butches play with that? Are we only doing dress up, or do we want to be a cowboy? How do you differentiate the idea of playing a persona and becoming a persona? So I want to explore those things, given how incredibly tough it is right now in my country.

In a previous interview with Dazed, you connected the lesbian cowboy with the activists in Portland using inflatables to protest ICE and the idea of joy in activism.

Catherine Opie: I think in the same way we all watch Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart – the idea of humour within politics as a way for us to connect to these atrocities happening that are baffling to us and that we have no control over. I think using a persona or humour to unpack something creates a different way that people can enter it. If I’m just the angry lesbian yelling at you, that’s not going to really do anything, because that's exactly what’s happening within the MAGA movement. And so to be more theoretical and philosophical, it’s a way to have fun and play a bit, but also be incredibly serious with really important things to say.

Going back to the idea of resistance, I think Minnesota has done this beautifully as well. Minnesota is singing, they’re out there where the ICE agents are and they’re singing. They’re asking them, ‘Is this who you want to be?’ through song. You know, I understand why things go into violence, because violence is what’s being put on us. But I think the more that we can resist in a non-violent way, to go back to those MLK moments, and what nonviolent protests mean, and the collectivity of it, we will win. We actually will win.

One of your most enduring pieces of work is Self-Portrait/Pervert (1994). So many people have seen that final image, but what can you remember of the process of making it?

Catherine Opie: The needles took about an hour. And then ‘Pervert’ took a little over an hour for the cutting. It was done with 14 to 15 people in my studio with food laid out. And it was a collective moment, which you don’t see in the photograph at all. It was total community. My two best friends, Melissa and Joe, who I have portraits of in the early work and also are in the Dyke Deck, were professional piercers, so they did all the needlework. 

I was taking what was private within the dungeons and making something very public as a piece in protest to being called a pervert. In the same way as Steakhouse tattooing ‘dyke’ on the back of her neck. All I know is I come from one of the most loving, consensual communities that you seem to want to fear and put laws on my body. But this is one of the most amazing groups of people. And so for me, ‘Pervert’ is my Henry the 8th. It is that moment that I embodied what language is being put on me. But what was around me was people holding my hands and being behind me and totally getting me through making that piece. It was a community.

How have you felt carrying that word on your body for 20 years?

Catherine Opie: So it’s been interesting to hold it. It’s something that I wouldn’t ever take away, but it’s also something that I probably would not make today as an artist. And I think that’s a really interesting thing to think about. I made that within a community, at a time when I was not an exhibiting artist. The first place that ‘Pervert’ ever showed was the 1995 Whitney Biennial, and I had to go home to my parents and show them the portrait and tell them that I was a leather dyke and come out in a totally different way. And there were problems. I asked them not to show it to my brother’s wife because she was a Christian nationalist, and I didn’t think that she would let me see her daughter anymore, my only niece. So the thing about ‘Pervert’ that was hard for me was the assumptions that people had on me as a human being because of making that piece without knowing me.

This was of the time and you have to understand blood, you have to understand Aids, you have to understand the culture wars, what it was like for Jesse Helms to hold up Mapplethorpe photographs on the floor of Congress. You have to understand why these things were made within the culture wars of America, that the NEA closed down, no more giving artists grants, because, oh God, they could make something like ‘Pervert’ with the money from the government. So if people really understood more of what was happening within that time, historically, ‘Pervert’ is a perfectly well-placed piece. But I think the problem is that people get scared of ‘Pervert’. It really unsettles them. And I always am thinking, for the woman out there who has had an enormous amount of plastic surgery, what is the difference between ‘Pervert’ and that? Again, the hypocrisies.

You did an interview with Dazed in December where you said you were reflecting on your role as a queer elder, and how you can be useful and calm people’s fears during this time. Where are you with that right now?

Catherine Opie: Well, I’m gonna stand here at my opening and welcome the public and hug every queer that needs to be hugged by me, because they’re struggling so much with the times that we’re living in. As an elder, I’m just going to continue to represent and forge forth the path of what it is to live in fear of government retaliation, of laws that create harm, and try to allow them to understand that it's actually okay to be who you are. Mama Cathy’s here – that’s what my son calls me, Mama Cathy.

Catherine Opie’s To Be Seen is running at the National Gallery, London, from 5 March until 31 May 2026.