Verbal Description: Catherine Opie, Self-Portrait/Cutting, 1993

Narrator: This photo is a self-portrait of the artist, who is seated in front of a dark emerald green wall with her back turned to the viewer. The large-format photograph is 40 inches high and 30 inches wide. Catherine Opie’s naked torso takes up the bottom two thirds of the frame, with the bottom of the photo ending at her waist. Opie describes herself as a dyke, and even without clothing and facing away from the camera she reads as butch, due to her short brown cropped haircut, caramel-dyed tips, and thick silver hoop earrings. Her skin tone is pale with red undertones, featuring a smattering of light brown freckles across her shoulder blades and slight pink coloration down her back. 

The artist has a black ink tattoo banding her right bicep that features an illustration of wave-like shapes and a rope tying into a knot. In the center of the artist’s back, there is a fine-line illustration carved into her skin, with beads of deep red blood dripping from some areas of the thin linework. The style of the illustration is akin to that of a young child, as it utilizes simple shapes to create a rudimentary landscape with two stick figures. The figures have circular heads and triangular torsos, and to their left, there is a house with a triangular roof and squares to indicate a door and windows. Above the two figures, there is a cloud with a portion of the sun peeking out from its upper left. To the right of the cloud, there are two short lines following the contour of the cloud shape, like line drawings of birds flying in the sky. Both the stick figures wear triangle skirts. 

While the act of carving an image into skin is visceral, the figure in the photograph appears comfortable, with her arms resting at her sides and her shoulders level. Behind her is a plush dark green backdrop that features a pattern of monotone illustrations of fruits, such as apples, grapes, and cherries, piled upon draped fabric. During this period, Opie was an active member of the SM queer community in San Francisco, and other works from the time feature markings and accessories that nod to this subculture. Opie has explained that when she made this photograph in 1993, it depicted a dream that felt out of reach:

Catherine Opie: 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.