Catherine Opie’s Norwegian Landscapes Are Portraits in Disguise

Photographer Catherine Opie might be known for her portraits of her queer community, her family, public figures, and sportsmanship, but she’s not hemmed in by anything. “Every body of work is connected, even though they might look very different from one another. But it’s all interconnected in this brain of mine,” the photographer said during a Zoom interview from her home base in Los Angeles.

“Mountains Don’t Know Their Names” does indeed look very different from her other work. The exhibition currently on view at PoMo in Norway (through January 3, 2027) was created during a three-week immersion in the Norwegian winter landscape in 2024. Opie aspired to the vernacular rather than the traditions of landscape photography. As an American artist, she delivers an outsider’s gaze on the Norwegian topography while also asserting a universal sense of awe before nature. There are 53 works on view from amongst thousands of images taken, complemented by 30 ceramic sculptures of Norwegian mountains developed as a visiting artist at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado in 2024.

The press materials describe this body of photographs as “approaching nature as she would normally approach living subjects,” which Opie affirms: she spent her quiet, cold time bonding with landscape to create meditative moments around light and the allure of the natural world.

The title “Mountains Don’t Know Their Names” is very compelling. As a portrait photographer, can you talk about photographing a subject that is unaware of itself, that doesn’t have language?

I think we’re going through an incredible time as a species. We’re watching our planet burn, literally—we have fires right now in France and Spain, unheard of fires, right at this very moment. Much of my work deals with the specificity of identity. Can a mountain have a specific identity in relationship to ideas around nationalism? In Norway’s case, that is somewhat true. The Blue Mountain, the idea of the blue light, through early paintings, began to epitomize a certain kind of national identity in Norway. “Mountains Don’t Know Their Names” is another way to talk about national identity as well as light, as well as the planet, as well as portraiture. In some ways, I’m using something that is an everyday occurrence where people live in that region: that is their mountain. But what does their mountain mean to them? Is it a landscape, or is it a sentient being, to a certain extent, in terms of how they get their water, their resources, the things that a mountain provides? I know that from living here in California, what the Sierras provide in terms of our water—whether or not we’ll be able to provide 70% of the nation’s produce from the state of California.

There’s these really large philosophical quandaries that I’m [addressing] within this body of work, as well as bearing witness. Which is always incredibly important within my work.

Photographing a mountain was posited as equivalent to photographing a person—that both qualified as portraits. How so?

In the idea of a mountain as a portrait versus a mountain as a landscape, I think obviously one would argue—and certainly religious scholars would argue with me—that a mountain is not a sentient being. But at the same time, we’re using these resources for rare earth and minerals.

I have a really amazing artist friend, Liz Larner, and one day, we were talking about the alchemy of materials and whether or not these materials give us energy, and then geeking out that maybe AI is actually going to control us because the rare earth and minerals actually know that they need to make the planet better. I love going in that sci-fi direction of a mountain being a sentient being. I think that that’s a great Kim Stanley Robinson read—it’s like right out of Ursula Le Guin, out of Octavia Butler. What is this that we’re doing all the time, in relation to the valuing of resources?

That a mountain could be a sentient being: why not? It holds an enormous amount of life on it. If we were to track every form in terms of the biology from a mountain, I think we would be shocked at how alive a mountain is. In the same way, we were totally surprised that trees talk to each other. These things are really important for us to remember, and I think that art can frame things in this way.

You did a three week immersion in the region, directly within the landscape. How did you organize this immersion? Annex question: was the act of looking at something that static a different kind of exercise for you?

It wasn’t static. I made it static. You don’t see any of the elements of what I’m dealing with in order to make the photographs: You don’t get that I’m freezing. You don’t understand that the wind is blowing to a point where if I don’t hang on to my tripod, it will skate across the ice. The [mountains] become these silent stand-ins. It is a true representation, because I’m not manipulating it.

How I organized myself was I gave myself a twenty-day road trip. I knew that each location needed to be five days. I thought I was going to be alone, but then I ended up having my friend Kate Kunath come with me, who made a brilliant video piece that’s in the museum, that accompanies the work. What’s really cool about this piece is you see me thinking in real time about how I’m trying to make this body of work. You don’t ever get that from me. You always just have the work.

Five days in each location was important because I didn’t want to be just a road tripper, where you go through a place and you take some pictures of that place and then you move on to the next location. I felt that if the mountains were this community’s friends, so to speak, that they were their resources, that I needed to get to know them on different days and under different lighting and under different moods—maybe there would be a day that I wouldn’t get the blue light. So it’d be important that I stay there, knowing those mountains.

You’re showing 53 images. How big was the body of work that you photographed, and how did you make that edit?

Well, it’s really curious. It ended up being an edit which questioned photography on its own, and that’s part of the title. Here we have Trump wanting to put his face on Mount Rushmore, yet another mountain that was actually very important Indigenous land at one point in America. But I didn’t know that I would be making vernaculars. I didn’t know that I would want to do these sweeps of what it looked like of the snow blowing and the whiteness; I really was just going for the blue mountains. And then 10,000 photographs were made in a twenty-day period.

Between the conversations I had on videotape with Kate about what I was doing, it led to a very different body of work. Before, I just put out a body of work and we might be able to talk about it in terms of both art history and photo history. But this body of work attempted to actually break down these ideas of how we hold landscape photography and the vernacular and the experience of the vernacular. There is no Norwegian word for vernacular, and I find that very interesting. Yet the vernacular and what they present within their landscape is so utterly important to their identity. Every time you go into an old restaurant, there are photographs of Norway’s fishing history–its history is presenrted on the walls of every place you enter. I think that’s really interesting to think about how a nation becomes its own identity out of wealth, in terms of the kind of separating from Danish rule. What is the specificity of identity of a place is such a big question for me, in the work.

For me, what I want for the audience is to be held by these blue mountains, for them to be swept away, but also placed and displaced: all at the same time. The framing and the scale when you enter those rooms: I feel watching the viewer look at the work does that. I’m happy for that.

If you’re looking at the natural panorama as someone who is not from that place, is your gaze “other” by looking at it? 

Well, the gaze is always othered. I don’t speak the language. If I were to all of a sudden enter Norway and learn the language, speak Norwegian, and I lived there for 10 years, maybe there wouldn’t be the othering. And that is something that we always talk about within documentary photography. That is a very important ethical question, and but I think that’s why vernacular is so interesting, because if I can recognize, as outside of the community, what is important within their gestures, within their society, that’s embedded within their landscape, then isn’t that also, in the same way as in a portrait, recognizing a fellow face, a fellow traveler?

There’s not a grocery store that I don’t enter in Norway where there isn’t the sweet little hut with the reindeer sausages hanging in it—and that’s a vernacular. That is something that they recognize of themselves within their community. That’s the same way that Robert Frank came to The Americans under Guggenheim [fellowship], and we got to see America in a very different way at that time period. And we’re in a very interesting time period in Norway. They share a border with Russia. The kind of fights happening around NATO and the ideas of borders are everything that is being talked about globally on the world stage. Using these different moments, and being an outsider, not a Norwegian, still allows you to look very intently at these really big questions that we’re faced with.

How did the ceramic component feel like a good complement to the images?

Just the simplicity of the hands making clay, that earth comes out of earth. The idea that I tried to make something that I hadn’t met yet, before the mountains versus after the mountains. It’s just like sixty-five-year-old poetry at this point, to be honest, it’s just like okay, bring on my Kiki Smith, bring on my elders in me. Like, let’s get down and a little different in a way that we’re talking about materiality and representation.

Also, quite honestly, I’m losing the ability to use my hands: I am having cortisone shots all the time because of the weight of the cameras. I could be doing a Gucci campaign–I’m hand-holding a camera for eight hours a day that’s seven and a half pounds. My body is starting to get worn out from my own medium. So, quite frankly, heading over to work with clay is not only good for me mentally, but it’s also really interesting to see that transformation that photography can’t do, because it is out of an imagination. Photography is never out of an imagination, except for the conceptualization of the work. It’s always of the real.

Would you say that you had certain preconceptions about what it was going to be that you know on site felt different, or did you not necessarily conceive of anything ahead of time?

Well, I preconceived the framing and the light and what I wanted to get, and I didn’t know if it was possible. And then once I got that on the second day, I was like, “Oh my God, I got the light. It happened. It’s really here, like what I imagined.” And then all the rest just is because you’re out and about, and you photograph. I would say that one is always surprised by what happens on a journey.

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