Popular Photography on Campus April 2016

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niscent of Renaissance portraits: emerging from an inky background, their faces more illuminated than lit. Idexa kneels inside the frame gazing into the distance, allowing us to gaze back at her elaborately tattooed body. Author Jonathan Franzen sits with his back to the camera, inviting us to read over his shoulder. The chiaroscuro-style portraits have a strong relationship to painting, especially to the portraits of Old Masters such as Hans Holbein, Rembrandt, and Caravaggio. Opie looks at that relationship both conceptually and technically. “The question that I’m asking... now [involves] lighting and the way one would think about Renaissance lighting,” Opie explains. “Are we able to hold the person longer, to think about portraiture vis-à-vis the fact that social media has taken over in relationship to the selfie? By using an older trope, do I have people actually standing before the work longer?” OVERPASSES Untitled #2, #1, #11, and #30, 1994, from Opie’s series Freeways. INTIMATE POSESSIONS “Jewelry Box #6,” 2010–2011, from 700 Nimes Road (Elizabeth Taylor). IMAGE OF AN ARTIST “Ron,” 2013, from Recent Portraits. 28 POPULAR PHOTOGRAPHY ON CAMPUS APRIL 2016
To achieve that seductive effect, Opie uses ProPhoto lights with a fresnel over the strobe. (She shoots with a Hasselblad H2 and Phase One Q180 back.) “Then I’m able to control the light on the subject,” she says. “None of the light manipulation has happened post-production; it’s all done at the time of photographing. So I’m treating digital, for the most part, still as a platform, like I would treat a negative.” In the Portraits and Landscapes show at the Hammer and at Lehmann Maupin’s Chelsea gallery, Opie’s landscapes sit like space bars amid the portraits’ rich allegorical text. They prelude a six-story mural of Yosemite Falls that will be installed in May at the new L.A. federal courthouse. These images, too, invite pause. They stop the viewer as the brain tries to decipher the details. Then the gaze softens, as if staring long enough might make the image drift into focus. More questions. “How do we keep people looking at images?” Opie asks. “Why are images still important in this completely saturated image space, a culture that has been created through social media?” As UCLA faculty, Opie advises artists to follow their passion, understand their work in context, and to ask questions. “That’s the cool thing about being an artist, right? You get to ask a lot of questions and try to figure them out by making work,” she says. “Be passionate, and where passion alone doesn’t answer everything, allow complexities to come in within your work [that] allow you to understand, really, the language that you’re working with. “And don’t stop,” she continues. “That’s the beauty of being able to express, of knowing one’s medium and history of art in depth—to really explore the complexities of ideas of representation. I never run out of questions, and that’s really a nice thing.” POPPHOTO.COM/CAMPUS POPULAR PHOTOGRAPHY ON CAMPUS 29
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