On a blustery Friday morning near USC, photographer Catherine Opie opens the front gate to her 1908 Craftsman home. “Come on in,” she says. She’s wearing a peaked hat, dress shirt and loose-fitting jeans, eyes framed by thick white glasses. We pass a tangle of succulents and overgrown flowers and walk inside, where Opie’s partner—a painter and resident green thumb, Julie Burleigh is just leaving for the day.

The feeling is cozy and intimate: worn oriental rugs, an Arco lamp, a disco Gumby by Raymond Pettibon, a small Lari Pittman in the hallway, a stylized photograph of two men dancing together by Robert Mapplethorpe is in the living room. Out the back door, past a chicken coop and a beehive, is Opie’s Roger White-designed studio. Here, the skylights have shades so Opie can block out the sun and create those Holbein-inspired studio portraits for which she’s known. Today, however, the shades are pulled back, shedding light on her latest project hanging on the walls: Elizabeth Taylor’s closet. Shot with a Hasselblad H2 with a digital back (in Opie’s opinion, the closest approximation to film), the photographs are close-ups of silks and ermine hanging cheek by jowl, almost unrecognizable beyond texture and color.

“What is iconic?” she asks. Throughout her career, she has consistently toyed with that concept. In the 2003 series “Surfers” and the 1994-95 series “Freeway,” she reworked those L.A. motifs. “Surfers are always on a wave; mine are waiting,” she says. “Freeways are always full; mine are empty.” The Ohio native, with degrees from SF Art Institute and CalArts, was first noticed for photographing members of San Francisco’s LGBT community, often in formal poses and with a regal air. Shaun Regen of Regen Projects, who has represented Opie in L.A. for the past 20 years, calls those endeavors “tender and proud at the same time.” Her self-portraits, more aggressive, have also made a profound impact.

With Taylor, Opie took a similar approach. “The estate understood I wasn’t interested in the project in relationship to her celebrity. I was interested in the relationship to what is human,” she says. It’s the first time any photographer has tackled the inner sanctum of Taylor’s closet. A business connection first put Opie in touch with Taylor’s people (they have the same accountant), and Opie began the six-month project in 2011 without ever meeting the actress, who had been promised the final edit of the photographs. “She would watch me through her bedroom curtains,” recalls Opie. Then, when Taylor passed away before the final edit, the body of work became both a documentation of her possessions and the dismantling of Taylor’s personal space. “That in itself was a challenge,” says Opie. “I didn’t want the project to be in the realm of morbidity, but this was intense because it was through a transformation.” The binder of contact sheets includes images of jewels piled like pirate’s booty spilling out of a box. In other shots, gems are out of focus and become abstract shapes and forms. In later pages, the objects become archival—the members of Christie’s tagging them like artifacts. Though details will be hammered out in the next few months, Opie hopes to have completed her final selects by August, and she plans on an Eggleston-style portfolio, a coffee table book and exhibition.

By Elizabeth Khuri Chandler

Pictured: Opie in front of her many seamless colored backgrounds.
Photo by Jessica Sample.

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