UC Riverside

Contemporary American photographer Catherine Opie's work Being and Having (1991) is a series of thirteen photographic extreme close-up portraits, resembling head-shots, of lesbian women wearing false mustaches, tattoos, and other stereotypical masculine accessories. This thesis proposes that this series works as a visual presence on behalf of the queer community during the threshold moment of gender destabilization. In Being and Having, Opie uses the conventional genre of portraiture to present alternatives to gender, ultimately promoting a protean understanding of identity. Both embracing and pushing against the portrait tradition, Opie turns what we assume about portraiture on its head while effectively historicizing the contemporary portrait. A mixture of documentary and conceptual photography, this series is a complex comment, at once personal and political, on the artifice of gender, the social constructions of power and questions surrounding individual identities and constructions of community.