Gem Fletcher: Hey Cathy, I wanted to start by talking about the image of motherhood in culture. It’s a big topic. Where did your brain go first?

Catherine Opie: The idea of the Virgin Mary really fucked up motherhood. Those images already did harm through their control of women. The idea that one could reproduce miraculously without any science to it. These religious myths, from which these images derive, are among the greatest campaigns against humanity, creating a fear-based ideology through God about who is acceptable in society and who isn’t. Even when you think back to the first photographic exhibition, The Family of Man, which also sets up motherhood in this almost iconic way. There are many false narratives out there. The images that surprise me about motherhood are the ones that pervert the very notion of it. 

GF: The Trojan Horse.

CO: Exactly. Like when you see a 15th-century painting where a baby is at the nipple, but then a snake is biting the skin. What does that kind of representation begin to do? How does it skew or challenge the Virgin Mary perspective? Gratefully, just in the photographic history of motherhood, it’s been explored with and played with in very important ways. Tina Barney, Justine Kurland and Del LaGrace Volcano all offer different ways to think about being an artist and a mother, while playing with the performance of motherhood, for or against.

GF: Ironically, talking about the immaculate conception and stereotypes of motherhood, I remember you saying that when you got pregnant with Oliver [Cathy’s son], there was this delusional expectation that butches couldn't get pregnant, right?

CO: It was the weirdest thing to me, grappling with people's perceptions about butches at that time. I got pregnant in 2001, and the fusion of me being butch and sporting a moustache while being pregnant was really confusing for people. I always wanted to have a baby, but the stereotype of a mother was ingrained in people's psyche, and it was not a butch woman! That's why making Self-Portrait Nursing was so important to me. It was about showing my body [as a mother], illustrating that this is what I desired, and I was going to give it to myself.

GF: Self Portrait/Nursing has been such a vital image for Queer women and non-binary people interested in parenthood. During your time contemplating having children, during pregnancy or motherhood, did you have any cultural touchpoints that offered you anything close to what you offered us?

CO: Not really. It was hard in that way. I think for me, it wasn't ever about seeing myself in art out there or what the possibilities were for me as a single person, but instead, I was interested in what it was to image children, and thinking about when that is done really well?

Helen Leavitt's photographs brought me great joy. She quietly captured a sense of a child’s world. I’m fascinated by Sally Mann’s work, but due to censorship, she was unfairly reduced to the bad mother - another label you have to contend with if you engage in representation work.

GF: We still don't have many images of butch motherhood in culture, let alone in museums. That photograph is tragically still so radical decades later.

CO: You're right. There aren't many examples. One of the greatest things about being queer for me was the notion of fluidity, but what happened to fluidity in relation to the idea of a nuclear family? 

GF: At your show at the National Portrait Gallery in London, I got to see your work anew. I have spent a lot of time thinking about your family work and your work with young people, but I’d never noticed just how prominently children feature in your portraiture. That show pushes that to the fore.

CO: I think children represent imagination and a certain freedom. They are unbound from ideas about what they are supposed to be and do in the world. It’s that internal world which is just so beautiful, and I think that's what I was trying to do with the portraiture of children - to attempt to embody the idea of childhood.

GF: Has this love for children always been there?

CO: Motherhood is a very complicated thing, especially for a butch lesbian, but I was always in love with children and really involved with children since I was a child. I started babysitting at the age of eight or nine, and I was the best babysitter in the neighbourhood. I was a camp counsellor. Before photography became my focus, I was studying to be a kindergarten teacher. There was never a moment in my life that I didn't love children. One of the most important aspects of motherhood is asking yourself, 'Why do you want to have a child?' Do you love children?

GF: Your first photograph was a self-portrait, aged 9, in a strongman pose, taken in 1970.

CO: This interest in children has always been there. If you look back at my negatives, I took so many photos during that decade when I was a camp counsellor and set up a darkroom at camp. I always had a camera with me. I did all the ads for Camp Marston. Until recently, the YMCA were still using my images from the 70s. 

GF: Children are also really prominent in Domestic, your series born from a two-month road trip in an RV around the United States, where you photographed lesbian couples or families in their homes.

CO: The child is really important in Domestic. You have Olivia with Joanne and Betsy, and Miggi & Ilene in the pool. I love that image of Mary Ellen Straub and her partner, where there's a crisis on the couch in the living room. One of the kids hurt his foot while we were right in the middle of making an 8x10 photograph. So the scene shifted, and you have this family coming together to care for this child who's in pain. That image became a further allegory in a certain way. 

GF: When I became a mother, I noticed we don’t value children as a society. All the connotations are negative; they are always doing something wrong, or at risk, or a burden. Your work refocuses us on what we can learn from them. You invite us to value children.

CO: Kids are taught to get in line right away, and in doing so, they lose their sense of wonder. Oliver still laughs about the day he came home from pre-school with his head covered in paint because he thought it might be more interesting for his hair to be the paintbrush. As a society, we take that freedom away from them and try to make them mini-adults right away, losing all the expressive, wild, amazing energy that comes from experiencing the world through a child's mind and body.

GF: What was your experience of early motherhood like?

CO: I loved it. I get to watch a person I've developed in my body go through all these different experiences, and I get to mentor them, guide them, and be their parent. I always wanted Oliver to know he could come to me with anything without judgment, and we could discuss it. That anything was possible. And that's the kind of relationship I have with him. To be able to put all this love into this being was an incredible thing. Also, there is a huge healing element of motherhood. I got to be a mother in a way that I wish I’d been mothered.

GF: There's so much discourse now about raising boys and the crisis of masculinity. I’m curious about your experience raising Oliver. Was there a certain pressure there?

CO: For me, it brought in my internal homophobia. I was really worried about having a girl because I didn't know how I was gonna respond to playing with dolls, dress up and things like that. That was really challenging and scary for me. So when I had a boy, I was so excited. There were going to be cars, skateboards, Tonka trucks, all the boy-coded things that I wanted as a child, [because I identified as a boy as a kid]. I remember trips to shoe stores with Oliver where he's trying on the sparkly slippers, and I'm trying to talk him into the light-up dinosaur shoes. For me, it was so interesting because I had to challenge my own perspective on what I wanted from masculinity. I wanted to perform masculinity for my child in a way that I craved when I was little. 

GF: Oliver appears in the work throughout his childhood. As a public figure who was constantly bearing witness, was there a sense of having to code switch or protect him in any way? 

CO: He could never be separated from my public life because I chose to put him in work. There's a fandom around Oliver, but it’s in a sweet way, not a scary way. The scary stuff around being a public person with a child, is the threats. I’ve had stalkers from National Christians of America threaten us. Threaten to take my child away because I’m a lesbian. That kind of violence has only gotten worse in this Trumpian world.

GF: I read somewhere that you're a Christmas mom.

CO: Oh, I am. I got a Santa Claus inside me, constantly. I love big Christmases. I collect things for Oliver all year on my travels so I can create these perfect gifts for him. I want my tombstone to read, Give more than you take!

GF: These notions of gender, performance and patriarchy are all threads in your new work, The Lesbian Cowboy. 

CO: In the same way that I was discovering who I was in the 1980s and 1990s through persona play, I’ve kind of decided to talk about the world through a persona. I do think there's still something so important within queer culture: the notion of performance. What is performed? And how is the performance, in itself, the critique? The lesbian cowboy is about rewriting the potential of masculinity, but I’m not sure exactly how I’m going to do it yet, as it’s very complicated.

GF: Do you still feel that sense of urgency to speak truth to power through the work?

CO: This fight is a different fight now. The early activist in me was loud and radical. Now I think it’s more powerful to be in all the rooms and hear every single voice. I’m interested in very carefully dissecting the rhetoric of our time to parse it out in a very different way.

GF: Before we finish, I wanted to ask you: how did becoming a parent change your world?

CO: It made me more complete. It made me understand what it is to be responsible for a young life. Being a mother is just so important to me.

CATHERINE OPIE is an American fine art photographer and educator. She lives and works in Los Angeles, as a professor of photography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Opie studies the connections between mainstream and infrequent society. By specializing in portraiture, studio, and landscape photography, she is able to create pieces relating to sexual identity. Through photography, Opie documents the relationship between the individual and the space inhabited, offering an exploration of the American identity, particularly probing the tensions between the constructed American dream and the diverse realities of its citizens. Merging conceptual and documentary styles, Opie's oeuvre gravitates towards portraiture and landscapes, utilizing serial images and unexpected compositions to both spotlight and blur the lines of gender, community, and place while invoking the formal gravitas reminiscent of Renaissance portraiture and hinting at her deep engagement with the history of art and painting. She is known for her portraits exploring the Los Angeles leather-dyke community. Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and she has won awards including the United States Artists Fellowship (2006) and the President’s Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Women’s Caucus for Art (2009). 

GEM FLETCHER is a writer and podcaster. Her work has been published in the British Journal of Photography, Aperture, Dazed, It's Nice That and AnOther, and she has written catalogue texts for Rhiannon Adam, Juan Brenner, Maggie Shannon and Flora Hanitijo, amongst others. In 2019, Gem launched the Messy Truth podcast, a series of candid conversations that unpack the future of visual culture and what it means to be a photographer today. Guests include Antwaun Sargent, Catherine Opie, Farah Al Qasimi, Carmen Winant, Paul Kooiker, Quil Lemons, Brea Souders and Laia Abril.