Type
Text
Type
Dissertation
Advisor
Uroskie, Andrew | Bogart, Michele H | Patterson, Zabet | Craig, Megan.
Date
2014-12-01
Keywords
Catherine Opie, Geography, Landscape, LGBT, Los Angeles, Photography | Art history
Department
Department of Art History and Criticism.
Language
en_US
Source
This work is sponsored by the Stony Brook University Graduate School in compliance with the requirements for completion of degree.
Identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/11401/76883
Publisher
The Graduate School, Stony Brook University: Stony Brook, NY.
Format
application/pdf
Abstract
Catherine Opie achieved success and notoriety during the 1990s for several controversial photographic series of herself and members of her LGBT community that explored themes of sexuality, gender, and identity. She also, however, built a contemporaneous body of work throughout the 1990s comprised of landscape series. These images embraced a cool stoicism and deadpan aesthetic that contrasted the intimacy and dissidence of Opie's portraits, as well as the early branding of her as a contemporary provocateur. They therefore received little scholarly attention. More recent renewed interest in Opie's landscapes is largely inspired, retrospectively, because images of place have now overtaken images of people within her oeuvre; however, much of the commentary attempts to relate the landscapes to the portraits without supplying sufficient analyses of the landscape series themselves. " Spatial identity" has become a catch-phrase for characterizing the themes within Opie's work, and most critics do not probe further than to state that place and identity are simply " related" for Opie. This dissertation analyzes Opie's early landscape series in order to amend an oversight within the existing scholarship, as well as supply the necessary grounding to discuss the relationship between place and identity in her work. Focusing primarily on Opie's landscapes of the 1990s, this dissertation argues that her seemingly indifferent imagery of depopulated and banal places--freeways, mini-malls, and suburban housing developments--responds to the specific sociopolitical climate of Los Angeles, as well as to the cultural milieu of the millennium that anticipated an increasing physical alienation in the context of new virtual technologies. Ultimately, I argue, Opie's works demonstrate how identity is a product of regionalism, and that both literal geographical place and abstract space are germane to self-ideation. Her landscapes are therefore not simply about place, but about the self and its multiplicity within forever shifting contexts. | 249 pages
Recommended Citation
Woltmann, Kim, "Place Self: Identity at the Crossroads of Place and Time in Catherine Opie's Los Angeles Landscape Seires, 1988-2004" (2014). Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions). 2758.
https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/stony-brook-theses-and-dissertations-collection/2758