Source: The Conversation – UK
This summer, as Edinburgh comes alive with the Festival, one of the most significant figures in contemporary photography comes to Scotland for the first time.
Curated in collaboration with the artist, Catherine Opie: To Be Seen at the Royal Scottish Academy features nearly 80 works spanning more than three decades of her pioneering photography.
Across seven rooms the works appear alongside a selection of portraits from Scotland’s national collection that ask questions about the politics and practice of portrait-making, drawing connections with the works of artists such as Pablo Picasso, Young British Artist Gillian Wearing and baroque Italian painter Benedetto Gennari.
Born in Sandusky, Ohio, in 1961, Opie has transformed the landscape of contemporary photography through a body of work that is as politically inquisitive as it is visually compelling. She has redefined portraiture and documentary photography by bringing queer culture, overlooked communities, intimate relationships and everyday lives into sharp focus, challenging conventional ideas of identity, belonging and representation.
From self-portraits and family studies to images of subcultures, landscapes and public spaces, her works have reshaped conversations around who is visible in contemporary culture. Opie has influenced generations of artists and curators through her focus on power, community and the social fabric of American life. She has also spent 25 years as professor of photography at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she continues to inspire a new generation of American photographers through teaching and mentoring.
To Be Seen tracks Opie’s dedication to pushing boundaries. Early works present this queer artist’s own body as what she has described as a “billboard of identity”, challenging conventional assumptions about gender, sexuality and self-representation. Later photographs adopt a more intimate feel, exploring family, motherhood and ageing through works such as Self Portrait/Nursing (2004).
Here, Opie’s painterly portrait of herself breastfeeding her son is placed next to Picasso’s “blue-period” painting, Mother and Infant (1902), showing a woman from the back, head tilted, nestling her baby against her shoulder. Created a century apart, these two very different portraits connect through the universal experience of motherhood. And while Opie’s nakedness and tattoos in a Madonna-and-child pose contrast strikingly with Picasso’s more chaste and dreamlike portrayal of the mother-child bond, both are equally tender.
These photographs are shown alongside selections from her Surfers (2003) and High School Football (2007-2009) series, which move beyond the studio to examine communities that are part of the landscape of contemporary America.
In Surfers, atmospheric seascapes and closely cropped figures emphasise the relationship between humans and the vastness of the natural world. The unguarded portraits of teenage football players offer a nuanced reflection on community, vulnerability and the ways American masculinity is constructed. These works demonstrate Opie’s ability to connect the personal and the political, using photography to explore belonging and the social bonds that shape everyday life.
What becomes increasingly clear throughout the exhibition is the extent to which motherhood transformed Opie’s practice. Following the birth of her son Oliver in 2001, her work shifted from the confrontational body politics of the 1990s towards a more subtle exploration of family, care, intimacy and belonging.
Rather than presenting the family structure as biologically fixed, Opie turns her lens on the emotional bonds that sustain people’s lives and communities, examining chosen relationships and queer networks, and validating alternative forms of home. This is exemplified in a portrait of Elton John’s family in Elijah, David, Elton and Zachary (2025).
In her In and Around Home series, everyday moments among friends, partners and relatives become quietly radical acts of visibility, while portraits of her son, including Oliver in a Tutu (2004) and Oliver and Mrs Nibbles (2012) capture childhood as a place of play, curiosity and ambivalence.
These works are complemented by earlier self-portraits such as Self-Portrait/Cutting (1993), in which a childlike image of two women and a house is carved into the artist’s back, expressing a profound longing for family, recognition and belonging.
Together, these works reveal how motherhood became a turning point in Opie’s practice. Her focus widened from identity to the networks of care, intimacy and belonging that sustain everyday life, bringing a new emotional depth and tenderness to her portrayals of family, home and queer living. “I always want to take a human portrait. My goal in life is always to enter into everything with great care and with great humanity,” she once said in an interview.
In the 2010s and 2020s, Opie moved beyond portraiture to investigate landscapes, architecture and institutional spaces, examining how power inhabits our environments. From Los Angeles freeways and America’s National Parks, to photographs made during and after her 2021 residency in Rome, her attention turned to ideas of authority, belief and nationhood.
In her Walls, Windows and Blood series (2023), she mined the Vatican’s spaces and vast archive of tapestries, picking out scenes of devotion, martyrdom and conflict to produce striking photographic grids.
The series exposes the uneasy relationship between beauty, violence and power, revealing how images shape collective memory and sustain institutional authority across the centuries. While less autobiographical than her earlier portraits, these works remain driven by her enduring questions: who belongs, who is excluded, and how social and political structures shape the way we see ourselves and one another.
More than a landmark debut, Catherine Opie: To Be Seen also feels like a timely conversation with Scotland’s own portrait tradition. By placing lives that have often existed at the margins firmly at the centre of attention, Opie asks who is seen and remembered.
At a moment when questions of identity, community and belonging continue to shape public debate, Opie’s photographs do not provide simple answers. Rather they provide something more enduring: a compassionate record of how people create meaning, make connections and build their own sense of home.
Catherine Opie: To Be Seen is on at the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, until November 1
Katarzyna Kosmala does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/06/catherine-opie-to-be-seen-who-gets-to-be-visible-belong-and-be-remembered/