Catherine Opie on Identity and Collectivity | Aperture PhotoBook Club
Catherine Opie—best known for her sensitive portraits exploring identity and life on the margins of American society—invites five of her former star students in the newest edition to the Photography Workshop Series to discuss a wide range of topics alongside her in a series of engrossing conversations about embracing difference, from finding a distinct artistic voice, to the ethics of the camera, to the practicalities of making a photobook.Â
For our October 2026 Aperture PhotoBook Club gathering, Aperture’s executive director, Sarah Meister, will join the artist alongside two contributors to the title, Lucas Blalock and Jeff Whetstone.
Support for the 2026 Aperture PhotoBook Club is generously provided by FotoFocus.
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Image: Catherine Opie, The Gang, 1990; from Catherine Opie on Identity and Collectivity (Aperture, 2026). © 2026 Catherine Opie and courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London, Thomas Dane Gallery and Peder Lund Gallery, Oslo
Catherine Opie (born in Sandusky, Ohio, 1961) is an American photographer and educator. Her work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Opie’s photographs are held in more than fifty international public and private collections, such as the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York; Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. She has received numerous honors and awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), a United States Artists Fellowship (2016), and the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art Medal (2016). Opie earned a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from CalArts and previously served as the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Endowed Chair and professor of photography at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Lucas Blalock is a Brooklyn-based photographer whose work is in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Metropolitan Museum of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Portland Museum of Art, Maine, among many others. His work has been featured in publications including Artforum, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Art in America, Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, W Magazine, British Journal of Photography, and Time.
Jeff Whetstone is a photographer and head of photography at Princeton University, where he also serves as director of the program in visual arts. His work is in many public collections, including the New York Public Library Collection; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.
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