Catherine Opie: To Be Seen — a queer carousel of tattoos and tutus

Catherine Opie has made portraits of her community since the late 1980s, amid the Aids crisis, adopting unflinching realism, saturated colours and dramatic tonal contrasts borrowed from 16th-century portrait painters. Many of the works in To Be Seen use those devices deliberately as a declaration that these people deserve to be seen.

Opie is fascinated by construction — how costume, posture and role-play transform a subject. The 1991 series Being and Having, one of the show’s earliest bodies of work, has 13 lesbian friends dressing as their masculine alter egos, with Opie herself as Bo: fake moustaches glued on against an egg-yolk yellow ground, nicknames engraved into name tags like trophies.

Later projects include photographs of high-school footballers after practice, their uniforms and projected power set against equivocal adolescence.

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