Field Work

Catherine Opie remembers how blue wrapped around winters in Sandusky, Ohio in the 1960s, when Lake Erie froze over so thick you could drive straight into Canada. As a child, she’d dig tunnels through the snowdrifts, carving igloos that she could sit in for hours, bathed in a silvery light. At 13, her family decamped to Southern California, where that crystalline hue was replaced by the dry whir of sprinklers, endless sun, and the peculiar stillness of a state where nothing melts because nothing ever freezes. “I remember looking out at the Santa Ana landscape that first winter, and saying ‘This isn’t Christmas,’” she recalls, beaming from a sunny room in the coastal light she’s known for most of her life. 

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Decades later, Opie went looking for blue again—in search of the sublime she first experienced as a child. Following her retirement from the University of California, Los Angeles last year, she traveled to Norway, returning to the same mountains for 20 days, doing nothing but watching the light shift. Her aim was to let the peaks sit for her like a person might, revealing themselves in their own time. The resulting images, which she recently debuted in “A Study of Blue Mountains” at Lehmann Maupin New York, mark the first chapter in a series that will travel to PoMo in Trondheim, Norway in 2026, and London’s National Portrait Gallery later that year.  

For the series, Opie shot over 3,000 frames, spending months whittling them down to a final selection—none digitally altered. Across the collection of images, the palette collapses to one chilled register of blue. The subject is nothing but rock, snow, and the slow tilt of winter light. As part of her process, she also sculpted a series of small clay ridgelines that became the emotional and conceptual entry point into the series. Shaping the miniature mountains was meditative, a way to sit with the transformations she hoped to trace in Norway. 

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This turn toward the elemental marks both a continuation and a distillation of Opie’s earlier photographic language. The tension between belonging and exclusion, between memory and myth, is one she has explored since the ‘90s, when she began photographing queer life in bedrooms, studios, and clubs across LA. As her practice evolved, she began turning outward, incorporating places and geographies as mirrors for interior states. In her 2001 series “Icehouses,” she isolated candy-colored fishing shacks on a frozen Minnesota lake, each one marooned against a white horizon. Two years later, in “Surfers,” 2003, she captured lone figures bobbing off Malibu, suspended in the beat before a wave. With “American Cities,” 1997-2004, she stepped back even farther, stitching nocturnal skylines into wide panoramas. In the two decades that followed, Opie continued to toggle between portraiture and place, tracing emotional topographies across subjects as varied as freeways, high school football players, and the Pacific Ocean. 

“Blue Mountains” is the first series in which she’s made color the central focus, extending her long-standing interest in perception and emotional states beyond human subjects and environments. Blue has captivated the imagination since the days when Egyptian artisans fused sand, copper ore, and limestone into luminous pigment reserved for gods and pharaohs. First imagined in 1802 by the German poet Novalis, the “blue flower” became a lasting emblem of Romantic longing. By the time of Opie’s landscapes, the color was already crowded with history, its spectrum a stand-in for everything from devotion to devastation. Writers like Maggie Nelson, Joan Didion, and William Gass; painters like Pablo Picasso, Yves Klein, and Wassily Kandinsky; and musicians like Joni Mitchell, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday have all used blue to hold what felt too distant, too fleeting, or too much. Opie’s images slip into this chorus, chasing the cold, shimmering tone that first pulled her toward the world. 

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However, Opie’s new work isn’t just engaging with the color’s symbolic weight; it also grapples with who’s allowed to enter the landscapes where such meanings live. The land itself has long been coded as masculine territory, first by surveyors and conquerors, and later by painters and critics who could quote William Wordsworth without questioning who was left out. “Being a woman, an activist, and a feminist, why am I not permitted to enter the landscape? Why do so many lesbian artists work with interiors and still-lifes rather than being part of the world?” Opie asks. “Most of us queers live in urban areas because it’s safer, but a lot of us grew up in rural landscapes.” In choosing the mountains, Opie pushes back on a lineage of white male photographers who have long treated the land as territory to be claimed. The peaks become a way of rectifying that longing, not for Ohio, but for an expansiveness that queerness rarely gets to inhabit.  

That sense of possibility is something Opie now finds in unlikely places. Recently, she found herself mesmerized by watching her 23-year-old son Oliver play Rockstar Games' Red Dead Redemption, an open-world Western video game made for wandering. “A born-in-1961 dyke? Of course I want to be a lesbian cowboy,” she says, not missing a beat. For the artist, spelunking across the virtual frontier is just another way to think through authorship, autonomy, and the politics of presence. By the end of her life, Opie hopes to have added many more chapters about what it means for her to exist in the world. If the next one involves a rendered horse and a pixelated blue horizon, all the better—plenty of room to roam and the view is endless.