#sandusky

Fulton Street, Sandusky, Ohio.

Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio

An Ohio-themed end cap at the bookstore!

🎢 Happy National Roller Coaster Day! 🎢

Since the early 1990s Catherine Opie has produced a rich, complex photographic oeuvre that explores notions of communal, sexual, and cultural identity. From her early portraits of queer subcultures, pristine urban panoramas, and expansive landscapes to incisive views of her own domestic life, Opie has offered profound insights into the conditions in which communities form and the terms in which they are defined. Throughout her career, self-portraiture has served as a marker of personal and artistic development, as well as a reminder that she, as the photographer, does not stand apart from the groups she documents. In this vein, she made Self-Portrait/Cutting (1993) and Self-Portrait/Pervert (1994) alongside her renowned series portraying fellow members of San Francisco’s queer leather subculture. Like those images, her self-portraits address contemporary concerns of queer identity, while couching their content in a formal tradition recalling the sixteenth-century paintings of Hans Holbein. In these images Opie offers something deeply personal, even confessional, revealing powerful longings that are compounded by the great physical vulnerability of the sadomasochistic acts the photographs document. Ten years later, in Self-Portrait/Nursing (2004), Opie returned to the genre, newly suffusing her image with a sense of rapturous contentment, as she holds her infant son in a classically maternal pose that further evokes art-historical imagery. Faintly but clearly visible on her chest, the word “pervert” still appears as a scar, a trace of her history that carries forward through time. https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/14666

Sandusky, Ohio, July 1976 

𝔚𝔥𝔢𝔫 𝔪𝔬𝔫𝔰𝔱𝔢𝔯𝔰 𝔠𝔬𝔪𝔢 𝔬𝔲𝔱 𝔱𝔬 𝔭𝔩𝔞𝔶 ☠️