Catherine Opie: Harmony Is Fraught

The people and places of Los Angeles serve as familiar subjects in this collection of previously unseen photographs from Opie’s decades-long oeuvre

This publication presents more than 60 never-before-seen photographs by Catherine Opie (born 1961), drawn from over 30 years of making pictures in and of Los Angeles. Illustrated by more than 100 color and black-and-white images, Harmony Is Fraught sheds new light on a variety of subjects familiar to Opie’s expansive oeuvre. It includes intimate portraits of lovers and friends, documentary-style photographs of iconic and lesser-known landmarks, unprecedented experiments in self-portraiture, and scenes of queer life from the 1990s to the present. In “Catherine Opie’s Multiverse,” a new catalog essay penned in response to the exhibition, Karen Tongson considers the analogical relationship between the timelessness of Opie’s photographs and the city of Los Angeles itself, with its “jarring juxtapositions between 1920s Spanish balconies, mid-century dingbats, aspirational tudors and cloverleaf on-ramps to the future.”