Bed valances and side curtains, ca. 1700. French. Canvas; silk and wool embroidery in gros and petit point, 19 1/4 × 80 1/4 in. (48.9 × 203.8 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Irwin Untermyer, 1953 (53.2.1–.8)
What caught me was this idea that there was a place of imagination that you could explore.
I’m Catherine Opie and I’m an artist who works in photography.
I grew up in Ohio and I faced a cornfield across the street, and that was my everyday life as a young kid. At nine years old I read a book by E. L. Konigsburg, The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, and in the book the character, Claudia, runs away from home to The Met. Being this kid in the Midwest, what caught me was this idea that there was a place of imagination that you could explore.
I was watching the younger kids in a school group today walk through this room and even though the teacher was telling them to line up, you could tell that they just wanted to experience what a room is to be lived in.
But it’s a staged space. The room is not just a bedroom; it’s also a portrait. It’s a portrait of multiple histories in relationship to Louis XIV. This room tells a story about that period of time, with this opulence and this wealth, and the notion of what is valuable or what needs to be seen. You have these incredible wine pouring vessels with mythology: the serpents and a beheading.
Think of the privilege to own these objects that have taken a really long time to make. Things are gilded, they’re inlayed, they have craft in them. That’s a bad word in the art world right now, “craft,” you know—you don’t want to talk about craft. I actually value that I have really tried to master my medium.
Sixteenth/seventeenth century has always been a voice within my work. And I think that that’s why I long for this time period, is that slowness of the handmade. Even though I make photographs, the hand isn’t necessarily apparent in it in the same way that sculpture, painting, or other mediums, the hand might be apparent, but it’s in what I choose to look at and how I frame it. So, just like this room, that moment that you decide to describe in photography also becomes this kind of stage.
I treat these kinds of spaces as if I’m making photographs. I can look at paintings and objects thoroughly and with imagination, and I think that that’s because I had read this story so many times as a kid. Unfortunately that’s how I experience most of the world, which is a problem. My partner’s constantly telling me not to stare. She’s always telling me, “Just experience.” And I’m like, “I am! I’m experiencing by seeing.”
