Alma Feigis on the photographer’s journey north in search of the blue Arctic light, and what happened when she stopped looking for it.
PoMo opened its doors to Trondheim’s museum-goers two years ago, promising to provide a site for connecting, or rather re-connecting – the building’s original function from 1911 was a post office – the Norwegian city to the wider world. The museum’s top floor of galleries hosts Catherine Opie’s third solo institutional exhibition this year – her world tour, she calls it. Mountains Don’t Know Their Names follows the photographer’s three-week trip through the Nordic highlands and fjords, taking pictures during stops on the roadside with her rental car. The colours in the exhibition make each room feel colder – deep shades of blue, from sapphire to azure, line the borders of the galleries like windows. It is hard to believe that no colour was manipulated by Opie – she utilised three cameras and five lenses to achieve these otherworldly depictions of the mountains.
Opie began her road trip, in fact, with a determination to capture the distinctive blue light that can only be experienced in the Arctic. The urge that arose while on a visit to Oslo for an exhibition with Peder Lund. “It’s been living in my head for a very long time, but I could never take winter quarter off from teaching because that’s when admissions happen. This was the first trip I did upon my retirement that I really desired.” But the photographer is familiar with this light; it carries the stillness of mornings and winters she knew growing up in Ohio, looking across Lake Erie. Trying to understand what that blue holds – why we seek it in the works of Picasso and Derek Jarman, in the shade of cerulean, in dawn and dusk, in beginnings and endings – still draws her.
But the trip evolved to become a reflection on the ideas of landscape and the photographic form itself. “I like how things change,” Opie tells me. “I like how you can have such a solidified idea of what you want, and you conceptualise that tightly. But then, if you’re open enough to what has happened, that experience can also dictate the edit of the body of work. That’s what happened with this exhibition.” Opie put her own temporality aside for this show and connected instead with that of the mountains, slowing down the pace at which they change rather than one at which she sought change. “Transcendence is waiting,” Opie says. “And I think that is a sentiment that only comes with very carefully paying attention to the subtle changes of the light.” Hours, even days, were spent with each mountain – “getting to know each other” – waiting for a veil of white mist to clear and uncover a peak, or an evening shadow to reveal a jagged profile. “The idea of conquering is not in this show,” she adds, challenging the traditional ideas of the landscape genre. Indeed, the effect of the images is not that of the sublime terrains as depicted by the likes of Friedrich and Bierstadt – nor vast, a word tattooed in serif lettering on Opie’s right-hand wrist.
Rather, the peaks are singular and monumental, unique and strange in their textures and shapes, subtle details and forms. Theorist François Jullien wrote about Chinese landscape painting that nothing “strives to incite or seduce; nothing aims to fix the gaze or compel the attention” – the work depicts an ideal blandness. Here, in Opie’s show, the eye can’t help but catch on everything. It lingers on each mountain, some gently curved and rolling, others standing stark and sharply contrasted, with evening shadows cutting cragged lines into their cheeks. A few picture the winter sky more so than the mountain subjects themselves, seemingly in conversation with the works of Munch displayed on the floor below. Opie now witnesses and documents the same skies he painted; both artists’ respective media reveal the world each lived in, representing and witnessing with careful attention.
Vertical in orientation, it is tempting to declare that Opie transforms horizontal landscape images into portraits of the mountains, making human what is not human, animating what is not really alive – a true impulse of a portraitist. This conclusion is satisfying, if not slightly obvious. But this is no source of complaint for Opie, who has recently found a fondness for cliché and corniness – not a sign of a lack of meaningful inventiveness to her, but an insight into desire and attachment and expectation. “I might have previously rubbed up against a cliché, but this is the first time I’ve ever hugged it,” she tells me. To the first room in the exhibition, Opie has allocated the informal title of The Cliché Room, which questions “our longing for what our expectations are of photography and nature,” which is then distilled down to simple blueness in the adjacent room. There is a reason, she believes, why people are drawn back, again and again, to these images and signs. “We categorise and create specificities of things that are known to us,” Opie explains. “Within these formulas, we’re asking for an attachment. And so I’m asking people, what are your attachments?”
Alongside the exhibition is a 28-minute film made by Kate Kunath, a documentary filmmaker and Opie’s long-time friend, who embarked on the trip with her. The relationship between the two is a joy to witness – both during the candid car conversations (are there any good lesbian horror films?) and the reflections on their creative processes. The film reveals a vulnerable side of the photographer otherwise hidden (Don’t carve two stick figure girls with a house in your back, she tells the camera) and a process of working otherwise incomprehensible, even for Opie herself. “I don’t know what the body of work would have been like without the conversation about photography over the trip,” she tells me. “The fact that I had to reflect on what I was thinking and making at the same time is a very unusual state for me to be in as an artist.” From behind the car’s windscreen, you see Opie at the wheel, gleaning images as she drives, seeing potential light, the window her framing device. You see her slipping along snow at the edge of the road, laughing. Frozen in the half-light, in awe at the echo of an avalanche. An outsider, observing and reacting with the same openness and wonder that has made her a great artist. A woman, fearful of the idea of becoming blind while driving at night through a snowstorm.
