Icehouses and Surfers
In 2001 Catherine Opie created Icehouses, a series of fourteen photographs that form a loose narrative revolving around the temporary community of ice fishers in wintry upper Minnesota. Nearly two years later she followed this body of work with Surfers (2003), which focused on another community, the surfers off the coast of Malibu, California.
This video documents the installation of these two series, which are being brought together for the first time ever in Catherine Opie: American Photographer. Each series concentrates on the shifting positions of its subjects and the sublime beauty of the elements that surround them, progressing from clarity toward relative abstraction. Opie’s decision to use one of the most painstaking formats, a field camera loaded with 8 x 10-inch film, yielded a stunning amount of detail but also required an extraordinary degree of technical finesse, especially for Icehouses, where she braved up to an hour of inclement weather for each exposure. The extended set-up time, along with the period spent waiting for the proper conditions to align, lends these images a feeling of duration that echoes the hours spent waiting by the photographs’ subjects.
