Catherine Opie's Being and Having at Masculinities: Liberation through Photography

The thirteen photographs that make up Being and Having consist of close-up portraits of Opie’s (b. 1961, USA) friends – as well as a self-portrait of the artist as her alter-ego Bo, whom she has described as a ‘serial killer from the Midwest who’s a used aluminum-siding salesman’, sporting facial hair and other stereotypical masculine accessories. Carefully posed against a yellow backdrop, and with their names engraved on metal plaques beneath their image, the subjects gaze directly at the camera while they playfully borrow these masculine signifiers and mimic ‘manliness’. Created at a moment in time when gender was experiencing a radical destabilisation, as evidenced by the publication of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble a year earlier, Opie’s work has played a critical role in the way in which we understand gender as an always improvised performance.

What does it mean to be a man today? The Barbican's Masculinities: Liberation through Photography considers how masculinity has been coded, performed, and socially constructed from the 1960s to the present day.