Subculture vulture in focus

American photographer Catherine Opie's portraits of 'invisible' communities, from surfers to LA's 'leather dyke' scene, exude emotional generosity, writes Mark Hudson

- Mark Hudson

National Portrait Gallery, London

One image seems to sum up American photographer Catherine Opie’s first major UK exhibition. A tattooed, genderless person sits cross-legged on a stool in the show’s poster image, moustached, stick-thin in a singlet and big boots. This slight figure radiates a mixture of confidence and underlying anxiety that feels very redolent of today’s gender-fluid world. It’s a quality that will be familiar from a distance, though still mystifying to just about anyone over the age of 30. And it's encountered again and again in a show that feels like an update on the social and physiological transformation of our species. That's despite the fact that many of the images, including this one, taken in 1994, are over 30 years old.

Ohio-born, LA-based Catherine Opie, now 64, made her name with studies of marginal groups who have been little considered - “invisible”, as the earnest wall texts have it - in conventional art narratives, including surfers, high school footballers and the lesbian subcultures of southern California. If the first two groups feel like they've been well covered in popular culture, I doubt British gallery-goers will have had much exposure to Los Angeles's “leather dyke” underground, with which Opie and many of her friends are associated. Images of this tightly knit milieu with its boots, piercings and explicit S&M overtones set the tone for the exhibition.

This being the National Portrait Gallery, however, much – perhaps slightly too much - is made of Opie’s “referencing” of great Renaissance and Baroque painters, such as Caravaggio and particularly Hans Holbein, whose portraits of the Tudors hang in the gallery immediately upstairs.