Catherine Opie on Identity and Collectivity

An expansive dialogue about what it means to develop your artistic voice in collaboration with others.

In this series, Aperture works with the world’s top photographers to distill their creative approaches, teachings, and insights on photography—offering the workshop experience in a book. Our goal is to inspire photographers of all levels who wish to improve their work, as well as readers interested in deepening their understanding of the art of photography.

In this book, Catherine Opie—best known for her sensitive portraits exploring identity and life on the margins of American society—invites five of her former star students to discuss a wide range of topics alongside her in a series of engrossing conversations about embracing difference, from finding a distinct artistic voice, to the ethics of the camera, to the practicalities of making a photobook. Through words and images, Opie and her former students Lucas Blalock, Janna Ireland, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Jeff Whetstone, and Carmen Winant offer the reader insight into their individual and collective creative processes as they highlight Opie’s enduring influence as a mentor and trailblazer in contemporary photography.

Catherine Opie (born in Sandusky, Ohio, 1961) is an American photographer and educator. Her work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Opie’s photographs are held in more than fifty international public and private collections, such as the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York; Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. She has received numerous honors and awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), a United States Artists Fellowship (2016), and the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art Medal (2016). Opie earned a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from CalArts and previously served as the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Endowed Chair and professor of photography at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Lucas Blalock is a Brooklyn-based photographer whose work is in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Metropolitan Museum of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Portland Museum of Art, Maine, among many others. His work has been featured in publications including Artforum, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Art in America, Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, W Magazine, British Journal of Photography, and Time.

Janna Ireland is a Los Angeles–based photographer whose work is held in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Nevada Museum of Art, Reno; California African American Museum, Los Angeles; and Santa Barbara Museum of Art. She is assistant professor in the Department of Art History at Occidental College and author of Regarding Paul R. Williams: A Photographer’s View (2020).

Paul Mpagi Sepuya is a Los Angeles–based artist and associate professor in media arts and MFA program director at the University of California, San Diego. His work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among other institutions.

Jeff Whetstone is a photographer and head of photography at Princeton University, where he also serves as director of the program in visual arts. His work is in many public collections, including the New York Public Library Collection; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.