Untitled 10 (surfers)

Catherine Opie's series on surfers shows unconventional portriarts. The landscape shots don’t show the surfers individually riding waves, as we’re perhaps used to, but instead as a group sitting on their boards in the sea, waiting for the right wave to roll in.

“We think of surfers as ripping a wave really well, but if you go along the Pacific Coast Highway, this is what you’ll often see,” she said. “Surfers are also a temporary community. They exist at just this time, in the water.”

Finding a place within the American landscape was something Opie herself struggled with as a child, moving from Sandusky, Ohio to California while still at school. She recalled being beside Lake Erie, “to all of a sudden being what I felt like was the middle of a John Wayne landscape,” she said. “I think that we forget how large this country is and how that specificity of place changes in relationship to the way that we look at it.”