Catherine Opie is a US photographer whose work has been central to redefining contemporary portraiture since the early 1990s. Born in 1961 in Sandusky, Ohio, and based in Los Angeles, she first gained recognition for uncompromising portraits that foregrounded LGBTQ+ communities at a moment when they were largely absent from mainstream representation. Series such as Being and Having (1991) and Portraits (1993–97) for example, combine the authority of classical portraiture with subjects drawn from queer, leather and BDSM subcultures, asserting visibility. Throughout her career, Opie has maintained a practice that is both formally exacting and politically engaged, insisting on photography as a space where personal experience and social structure converge.

These concerns will be brought into focus in Catherine Opie: To Be Seen, the artist’s first major museum exhibition in the UK, curated in close collaboration with Opie from 5th March 2026 at the National Portrait Gallery. A series of interventions will also place Opie’s photographs in relation to the museum’s permanent collection, extending her exploration on themes of representation and presence.

The exhibition will span key bodies of work from Being and Having through portraits of LGBTQ+ friends inspired by the court painter Hans Holbein to later, richly staged, Baroque-inflected portraits of artists.

Across more than three decades, Opie has continually repositioned the portrait, working across multiple formats and contexts. Conceptually rigorous and formally controlled, her photographs address ideas of home, intimacy and family, while also engaging more broadly with politics, identity and power structures at national and international levels. Her subjects range from queer communities, mentors and collaborators to children, surfers, high school football players, political crowds and the artist herself through self-portraiture. Portraiture remains her primary lens, even as she has extended it to landscape and infrastructure, treating place as a register of collective identity.

Alongside her artistic practice, Opie has been influential as an educator, serving for many years as chair of the photography department at UCLA. Her work is held in major museum collections including the Guggenheim Museum, SFMOMA and MOCA Los Angeles. The exhibition is one of the most anticipated in London.