Catherine Opie, Self-Portrait/Cutting, 1993

Catherine Opie: Self-Portrait/Cutting in 1993 was really a really very personal portrait.

Narrator: Photographer Catherine Opie.

Catherine Opie: And personally what was going on in my life is I had gone through my first major domestic breakup. And so the cutting on my back, which was made by the artist Judie Bamber, was just this very simplistic drawing that I had made. You know, every kid in kindergarten draws the stick figure portrait of their parents. And so to draw two stick figure girls with triangular dresses became this moment for me to really talk about the longing for domesticity in relationship to a very homophobic world that I was inhabiting at that moment.

I would say that the work in certain ways is different than it was in 1993 because it's a very different kind of political position. We have the right to marry, I myself am married to a wonderful woman. I did get to have my domestic bliss and dream. There is a certain kind of idea of family that is allowed—television programs represent this, you know, and so forth—but that doesn't mean that homophobia doesn't exist and that we're being completely pushed always against the wall in relationship to that right of marriage potentially being taken away from us by the conservative right.