When she captured her iconic Self-Portrait/Cutting in 1993, Catherine Opie was longing for a life that felt out of reach . Depicting the photographer with her bare back facing the camera, the visceral image centers on a childlike scene of a house and two skirt-clad stick figures holding hands, carved into her skin with her own blood. Then in her early thirties, Catherine had already found a community in Los Angeles – the lesbian leather-culture circles that appear throughout her pictures from that decade – but a deeper yearning for another type of family led her to turn the lens on herself, a statement she intended as both personal and political.
