Alistair Fate (1994) depicts, presumably, a member of the LGBT community. Catherine Opie is known for her portraits of LGBT, queer, and outsider people; she intends them to come off not as shocking or different, but as human despite their deviance from societal norms. This image is one of several works by Opie in the Kadist Collection that show marginalized people, filtered through the artist’s signature appropriation of formal and classical portraiture in the interest of both documentation and reframing.
Since the 1990s, Catherine Opie has been recognized for her use of documentary photography to address issues of community and queerness, and the ways in which identity is shaped by architecture. Particularly resonant during the Culture Wars of the 1980s and early 1990s—a time in which the religious right tried to impose itself as a political force and cultural censor—Opie’s photographs privilege the representation of specific communities, whether the LGBT, teenagers, surfers, football players, or her group of friends who engage in sexual role playing, tattooing, and piercing.
Constructed out of metal or glass to mirror the size of FedEx shipping boxes, and to fit securely inside, Walead Beshty’s FedEx works are then shipped, accruing cracks, chips, scrapes, and bruises along the way to their destination...
Herculine’s Prophecy by Juliana Huxtable features a kneeling demon-figure on what appears to be a screen-print, placed on a wooden table, which has then been photographed and digitally altered to appear like a book cover, with a title and subtitle across the top, and a poem written across the bottom...
Sarcastically titled to call attention to the problematic notions underlying colonialism, this photograph shows hundreds of Native Malaysians seated quietly behind one of their colonial oppressors...
Wolfgang Tillmans initiated the ongoing series Faltenwurf in 1989, representing compositions of unused clothing, with special attention paid to the ways in which they drape and fold...
Tania Libre is a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson centered around renowned artist Tania Bruguera and her experience as a political artist and activist under the repressive government of her native Cuba...
Untitled (Breathless) presents a folded newspaper article on Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle (Breathless)...
Lynn Hershman Leeson’s genre-bending documentary Strange Culture tells the story of how one man’s personal tragedy turns into persecution by a paranoid, conservative, and overzealous government...
In the six-minute single-channel video Higher Horse , Kate Gilmore perches herself on top of a tall pile of plaster blocks, in front of a pink colored wall with vein-like streaks of red...
Lambri’s careful framing in Untitled (Miller House, #02) redefines our understanding of this iconic mid-century modernist building located in Palm Springs, California...
Visalia Livestock Market, Visalia, California results from Lockhart’s prolonged investigation of an agricultural center and community...
In this photographic series, Yto Barrada was interested in the logos of the buses that travel between North Africa and Europe...
The small drawings that comprise Study from May Day March, Los Angeles 2010 (Immigration Reform Now) and We Are Immigrants Not Terrorists are based on photographs taken at a political rally in downtown Los Angeles in which thousands of individuals demonstrated for immigrants’ rights...
Office Work by Walead Beshty consists of a partially deconstructed desktop monitor screen, cleanly speared through its center onto a metal pole...
The Last Post was inspired by Sikander’s ongoing interest in the colonial history of the sub-continent and the British opium trade with China...
Like many of Pascal Shirley’s photographs, Oakland Girls aestheticizes a dingy rooftop and a cloudy sky...
Custom-built for a silent film star in 1934 in Santa Monica, the Sten-Frenke House is an idiosyncratic icon...
The print Patient Admission, US Naval Hospital Ship Mercy, Vietnam (2010) features an Asian Buddhist monk and an American Navy Solider on board the Mercy ship –one of the two dedicated hospital ships of the United States Navy– sitting upright in their chairs and adopting the same posture...
Untitled (City Limits) is a series of five black-and-white photographs of road signs, specifically the signs demarcating city limits of several small towns in California...