Catherine Opie Presents New Photos in New York

Fifteen years after her breakout appearance at the Whitney Biennial, Catherine Opie is offering some of her never-before-seen gender-defying work in a new show, Girlfriends. Opie has played into the challenge of identity politics with her often-butch lesbian subjects and she is returning to the community she knows with new portraits at the Gladstone Gallery, featuring several famous women from model (and Angelina Jolie’s reported former lover) Jenny Shimizu to The L Word’s Kate Moenning to icon k.d. lang. But besides these familiar faces, the show also includes Opie’s small black-and-white portraits that she shot as a freshman documentarian in the early 1990s that she previously kept to herself.