Business Finance Media Technology Policy Wealth Insights Interviews

Art Art Fairs Art Market Art Reviews Auctions Galleries Museums Interviews

Lifestyle Nightlife & Dining Style Travel Interviews

Power Lists Nightlife & Dining Art A.I. PR

About About Observer Advertise With Us Reprints

Catherine Opie’s Norwegian Landscapes Are Portraits in Disguise

What began as a search for a particular blue light became an inquiry into national identity: "I would say that one is always surprised by what happens on a journey."

Photographer Catherine Opie might be known for her portraits of her queer community, her family, public figures, and sportsmanship, but she’s not hemmed in by anything. “Every body of work is connected, even though they might look very different from one another. But it’s all interconnected in this brain of mine,” the photographer said during a Zoom interview from her home base in Los Angeles.

Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter

Thank you for signing up!

By clicking submit, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime.

“Mountains Don’t Know Their Names” does indeed look very different from her other work. The exhibition currently on view at PoMo in Norway (through January 3, 2027) was created during a three-week immersion in the Norwegian winter landscape in 2024. Opie aspired to the vernacular rather than the traditions of landscape photography. As an American artist, she delivers an outsider’s gaze on the Norwegian topography while also asserting a universal sense of awe before nature. There are 53 works on view from among thousands of images taken, complemented by 30 ceramic sculptures of Norwegian mountains developed as a visiting artist at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado in 2024.

The press materials describe this body of photographs as “approaching nature as she would normally approach living subjects,” which Opie affirms: she spent her quiet, cold time bonding with landscape to create meditative moments around light and the allure of the natural world.

The title “Mountains Don’t Know Their Names” is very compelling. As a portrait photographer, can you talk about photographing a subject that is unaware of itself, that doesn’t have language?

I think we’re going through an incredible time as a species. We’re watching our planet burn, literally—we have fires right now in France and Spain, unheard of fires, right at this very moment. Much of my work deals with the specificity of identity. Can a mountain have a specific identity in relationship to ideas around nationalism? In Norway’s case, that is somewhat true. The Blue Mountain, the idea of the blue light, through early paintings, began to epitomize a certain kind of national identity in Norway. “Mountains Don’t Know Their Names” is another way to talk about national identity as well as light, as well as the planet, as well as portraiture. In some ways, I’m using something that is an everyday occurrence where people live in that region: that is their mountain. But what does their mountain mean to them? Is it a landscape, or is it a sentient being, to a certain extent, in terms of how they get their water, their resources, the things that a mountain provides? I know that from living here in California, what the Sierras provide in terms of our........

© Observer