Catherine Opie: To Be Seen at The National Portrait Gallery – a reminder of why we go to exhibitions in the first place

American photographer Catherine Opie’s new show at the National Portrait Gallery begins – or ends, depending on which order you explore it in – with her “interventions”. These photographic portraits are installed between the gallery’s paintings of Victorian leaders, captains, artists and politicians. They sit alongside them as though somewhat familiar.

This familiarity is, in part, down to the formal qualities of Opie’s portraits. It is also due to the depth of the prints, and to the ways in which the National Portrait Gallery appears to acquaint everyone on its walls with everyone else.

Most of Opie’s photos, however, are on display in another space that resembles a miniaturised version of the gallery. Prints hang in rooms and along constructed corridors that are reminiscent of both a domestic space and a museum. As well as portraits, there are cinematic images of American football fields; players standing during a break in play, or seen in practice. Also on show is a portrait of the ocean, the horizon almost indistinct from the grey-blue sky. Five small figures float in the middle distance, sitting on surfboards.

From Opie’s Walls, Windows and Blood series (2023), an image of the Vatican is on display, as are several of her documentary style photos. If Opie’s portrait studio photograph manages to momentarily exclude the outside world, then these images bring the outside world back in.

The idea of private space made public, and of inclusion and exclusion, underpins many of the works that feature in the show, which spans several decades of Opie’s life and career. Close attention is consistently paid to what is really involved in being represented. By extension, there’s a focus on what it means to have been misrepresented, projected onto and positioned politically.

Sitter and photographer

Some of Opie’s best-known images are her self-portraits. These include Self-Portrait/Cutting (1993) and Self-Portrait/Nursing (2004), which reflect, respectively, the desire for and arrival of family. But Opie’s portraits of other people also share something with the self portraits. Not only because many of the sitters are Opie’s friends and family, but also because the act of portraiture itself forms some hard-to-define connection between sitter and photographer.

Portrait photography is interesting this way. A portrait photograph seems to invite the imagination of an interaction that was both contained in, and extended beyond, the time of the exposure. It also suggests what was beyond the frame and behind the camera – including the photographer.

I imagine, looking at Opie’s portraits, how the sitter was directed, positioned and repositioned, the conversations that did or didn’t take place, the adjustments made to the lighting or backdrop. The portrait studio is a constructed space, but the formal portrait photograph does not pretend otherwise. It is a construction that is presented as such. This is the space in which photographer and sitter meet. Although this meeting is for the purpose of making the portrait, the portrait cannot quite show the extent of the exchange that takes place; it is necessarily a kind of reduction.

In Opie’s photographs, the constraints and limitations of the portrait are part of its potential. Its spatial and temporal boundaries allow for precision; the tilt of the head, the direction of the gaze, the colour of the light can all be controlled. The curation of this space, which is designed with the camera in mind, also frames an uncommon exchange between sitter and photographer. And the long history of the genre lays out a set of representational rules, long afforded to sitters with status, but which can be extended to people and communities that the society’s predominant visual culture has excluded.

Opie’s photographs extend the formality and visibility of classical portraiture to queer communities, as well as to friends, family and groups formed through sports, politics or shared passions. They also engage with broader ideas of identity, family, the body and politics. By working with – rather than against – the genre’s formality, Opie creates the possibility for many different interactions between her portraits and those that came before them.

This exhibition reminded me that the National Portrait Gallery was one of the first galleries I remember enjoying at 15 or 16. I loved it because there were faces everywhere. The faces on the walls began to change how I saw the faces of the visitors in the gallery.

As Opie has said of the gallery’s collection: “Everybody’s looking at everybody.” Perhaps everyone is also imagining everyone – not only in the moment their portrait was made, but also who they were when they left the studio and headed back into the world outside.

Catherine Opie: To Be Seen is at The National Portrait Gallery until May 31 2026

Alice Mercier is an AHRC-funded PhD student