House and Home

This photograph was taken in 1995 as part of my Domestic 1995–8 series, for which I set out on what I called my ‘great American road trip’. I spent three and a half months travelling around the country in an RV, finding my subjects along the way. I would show up to the lesbian bar or the queer bar in a small town and have the DJ announce that I was there trying to find people to make pictures of.

My tagline my whole life has been: without representation, there is no visibility. With this series, I wanted to fill in the holes that I felt were present in contemporary photography dealing with domestic life. I had always been searching and longing for domesticity, and maybe, through making these images, I was also trying to find out what this meant for myself.

This image is of a prominent community house in San Francisco. The two people on the far left and right of the picture, who now go by Silas and Harry, are still best friends. They owned Red Dora’s Bearded Lady, which was a coffee shop and an important community centre in the city. I called it my ‘office’ when I was making my early studio portraits in the 1990s, finding people there that I wanted to photograph.

This picture is so important to my idea of how family is built. It doesn’t just mirror the heterosexual norm of a domestic couple but shows that a family can be a collective household. After all, that is how so much of the lesbian and queer community was built; we help one another because we are always on the outside.

^{Flipper, Tanya, Chloe, & Harriet, San Francisco, California 1995 was purchased with assistance from Abigail Baratta (Tate Americas Foundation) in 2018. It is on loan to Catherine Opie: To Be Seen at the National Portrait Gallery, London until 31 May.}

^{Catherine Opie is an artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She talked to Enrico Tassi.}