[ atmospheric electronic music ]
[ CATHERINE OPIE ] What are you gonna say, huh?
What are you gonna say to the camera?
You got to look at the camera.
The camera's over there.
No, not there.
It's over there.
Look, Sunny.
Camera's there.
I understood from a really young age
that work had this potential to convey time.
It was literally going to the Toledo Art Museum
or Cleveland
and standing before a lot of the masters,
realizing what that depicted
in relationship to a narrative of the time.
The early portraits of my friends
is because of Hans Holbein.
I was looking at Holbein
in relationship to making that work,
especially the importance of a history of aesthetics
when you might be photographing subjects that people
don't really want to talk about or look at.
It couldn't be like a Diane Arbus photograph.
It had to completely focus on the body and also color.
I had to seduce the viewer in a different way.
Girlfriends, I think, will always be ongoing.
I think that it's gonna be just a collection of images
that I continue throughout my life hopefully.
Diana Nyad is definitely going to be
included in the body of work when I exhibit it next.
- I like this blue.
I think it's good to photograph it on a different color
than last year.
The photograph of her back is, to me,
just, like, one of these
perfect, amazing beautiful photographs
of this 61-year-old, powerful woman.
- All right, here we go, buddy. All right.
I want you to try to go in your head
where you're going when you're swimming, okay?
I just want you to be in that place a bit.
Okay, blink, and then open your eyes.
[shutter clicks]
And look right into the camera, Di.
[shutter clicks]
- [indistinct speech]
- Yeah.
How's the light look, Nicole?
- It's good.
Her– the shadow's a little dark.
- Can I see?
I like that, with the cap on and the goggles too.
- I like it too.
- I think it's good. - Yeah.
- I love that.
- That's cool. - That's beautiful.
Well, I think maybe I need the 80 lens.
- Yeah.
[shutter clicks]
I don't think that Surfers would have existed,
in terms of me making them,
if I hadn't made the Icehouses.
The correlation between Surfers and Icehouses
is this notion of a temporary community
that exists on the water.
One is a frozen temporary community.
The other is a community that is out in the pacific ocean.
Both of them contain that kind of metaphor of waiting.
You can slow down.
You can stop.
And you can maybe even have an ethereal moment.
[birds squawking]
- The trick is to not spill the coffee.
It's okay if the camera drops, but the coffee.
I grew up in Sandusky, Ohio,
and we left when I was 13 to move to California.
Sandusky, Ohio is the somewhat small town
that's located right on Lake Erie.
It's most known for Cedar Point Amusement Park,
Where everybody from the Midwest comes.
Cleveland is about 45 minutes north of Sandusky.
When the Cleveland Clinic approached me
to do a body of work,
I immediately proposed that I would
go and photograph Lake Erie,
and specifically because I wanted
to go back to Sandusky.
- One thing I don't like is
how the birds go in my horizon.
I would prefer that they would go away.
It's the first time ever that I've ever been able
to do a piece that is actually going to
stay there for the life of the building.
[shutter clicks]
The fact that I was commissioned
allowed me to spend a year
going in and out on six different trips
to my hometown
and look at it again
Through a 50-year-old photographer's eyes.
- I don't really like the waves breaking that much in it.
Aw, it got me wet.
[shutter clicks]
Every season that's represented in the piece
is four photographs of that season.
Except for winter has five.
And winter has five, specifically,
because we always think that the frozen landscape
will never disappear.
- This is sunrise.
This is sunset.
This is sunrise in the same location.
You'll see the foot tracks here.
I love that a careful viewer will pick up that little moment
that that is the same place at different times,
different days.
But I love that the little animal footprints are here.
And then there's just a slight band of pink in the sky.
Just does– ugh– all these crazy things.
Sitting with it isn't sitting with it for a long time.
It's kind of like how I photograph portraits as well.
I make decisions fairly quickly.
But I want to make sure that I can walk into the studio
three days in a row and have it hold me.
And now the biggest question is: "Amusement park or sailboat?"
Now, I could do away
with the Cedar Point one altogether
and go to that really ethereal fog one.
See how attached I am to Cedar Point as a place.
It's pretty nice.
[laughing]
It's a little sad.
So that's where you have to let your nostalgia go away,
If you can.
I don't know.
[laughs]
I don't know if I can let–
I think so, ultimately, to make a better piece, yeah.
So...
The fact that this is going to be in a hospital setting
that can be life-changing for people
for either good news, bad news.
To be able to have a place that's ethereal
to almost escape to.
And I think of change in a certain way
As escape in my mind.
Like, they weigh out to be a little bit of the same.
And I suppose that's, um– that might be more personal.
You know?
It might have–
it might have more of a personal relationship
To actually what this place did to me when I was a kid–
was that I was allowed to escape, sometimes,
situations that were really hard on me
on an emotional level within our family.
And literally, I used the landscape
to change my emotional state.
And I think that that kind of comes up for me
in relationship to, often, how I photograph a place.
As I find this, what I deem as a–
as a safe place to go.
[indistinct announcements Over p.A.]
There were years that I emptied out American cities.
And what I mean by emptying out,
that I just wanted to look
at the specificity of identity through the architecture.
And so there weren't people in those big panoramas.
I think it started with the body of work
in and around home.
I was back on the street with a camera in my hand
like I was in the early '80s in San Francisco.
And I was looking at these groups of people
that had come together,
either to celebrate U.S.C. Football
or Martin Luther King
or a rally against 31 registered sex offenders.
I realized that it was really important for me
to no longer empty out the landscape.
But to fulfill this other kind of notion
of creating documents of our time.
I really wanted to make American landscapes,
the notion of American landscape
in terms of an identity.
[birds chirping]
- Oh, my gosh.
The trees are amazing.
- Oh, yeah.
Wisteria?
- No.
- No?
- Jacarandas.
- Oh, right.
- Yeah, wisteria's kind of a vine that grows over things.
- Oh, yeah.
What–
- But people from the Midwest say, "Jack-uh-ran-duh."
[sniffs]
Okay, let's go see our garage friends
and see if they're nice
and let me take a picture of them.
It's kind of a perfect portrait day.
- Mm-hmm.
- Hey, guys.
How's it going?
Hey, how are you doing today?
You know, I live up the street,
and I always come here and get my tires fixed.
I'm doing a photo series
of shopkeepers in the neighborhood.
I was wondering if I could do a portrait of you.
Okay.
Okay, ready?
Right here with me.
Just relax.
[shutter clicks]
Good. Let me look at that.
Ah...Very good.
Now, right here.
Okay, muy bien.
That's it.
Thank you very much.
Really appreciate it.
- Have a good time.
Thank you.
- Yeah, absolutely.
I really should learn how to speak spanish.
- I know.
-It's really ridiculous.
I live in Los Angeles, and I can't speak Spanish.
You studied French. What good is that for you here, huh?
- I know.
I studied German.
It's not really working for us, our languages.
- I know.
- See why that– What happened with that?
[shutter clicks]
And again.
[shutter clicks]
Perfecto.
And again.
[shutter clicks]
- Let me look at my focus.
Well, I like how the window framed her.
- Yeah.
- That's nice.
- Yeah.
- That's a really kind face.
Yeah.
So...
The curator Jens Hoffmann
approached a group of photographers.
And he wanted to extend the body of work
that the farm security administration,
the F.S.A. did in the 1930s
under Roosevelt
that was headed by Roy Stryker.
And Roy Stryker was the one who got Dorothea Lange
and Walker Evans to make
these great documents of the Depression.
The curator Jens Hoffmann
asked a group of contemporary art photographers
to basically believe that he is Roy Stryker.
and he's reexamining and invoking
The F.S.A.
period of photography.
And I chose to photograph
the shopkeepers in my neighborhood.
You know what I think is more than the color in these
that work the best for me is
the quality of light, that I have the daylight in it.
And I think that when you're balancing strobe
with daylight– and that's why I took down
the one of him, like, smiling in the grocery store,
is because it was too strobe-y.
And the same with the manager,
it read too much ss press photography, actually.
It's trying to get away from kind of a journalist read.
And for me, part of that is
what happens with light in an image,
that I need it to be balanced between strobe and daylight,
for it to be effective and for it to work for me.
Maybe...
I think this is a lovely portrait.
I don't know if that one will make it.
I like it, but I don't know if it's a good enough photograph.
But what I know right now in looking at these is,
these four do something
that I think that I can be held with,
um, you know, the next day coming into the studio
and the next day.
But as you make more, that's the thing with editing,
then you go, like, "Oh, well, this isn't gonna work now."
You just move it around and you move it around
until it feels like this right balance to you.
- Oh, my gosh.
He's getting so cute.
- Randy heavy.
- are you heavy?
Look at it.
Do you want to see the dog?
Ooh, I can't believe it cleared up the way it did.
- I know.
The sun started coming out.
I was like, "Wow."
- I know.
Okay, you want to– You want to go pick stuff, bud?
Let's go to the garden.
- We're gonna go to the garden.
- No.
- Uh-oh.
- Yeah, then you can come back and play with your friends.
- Can I go too, daddy?
- Huh?
- Can I go too?
- Yeah, you guys can go.
You can go.
- No practice today–
- I know.
- So you're free.
- Yeah, you want to come down to the garden?
You guys haven't been to the garden in awhile.
Hey, Oliver, do you want to get your scooter?
- No? - I'm fine.
- Okay.
Agh!
Oh!
Ashley!
[laughs]
See, this is why I need to start playing catch with Oliver.
Huh?
- Look.
One of the things that drives me as a photographer
is just extreme curiosity.
- All right.
Are you taller than me now?
- I think that's it.
Almost.
- Oh, my god.
You are.
- All right, that's it.
Early on, I was always looking
at the formation of community
in relationship to finding myself within the populace.
One of the reasons that I have been driven to the idea
of creating moments of representation of my time is,
not only finding myself within that,
it's also this unbelievable human need.
- No worries.
There you go.
You just put that in the compost.
So it seems, in a certain way,
I'm allowing myself to go back
to those street photography roots.
It's, like, where I land and what I observe
Is what I'm making images of.
- Limbo time!
- Whoa.
- Race you!
- I really wanted to play.
- No, you get to play right after we walk in the house.
- Why walking into the house?
- It's how they finish the piece.
They're filming us.
- What?
- Oh, look. I got a box.