Recently I read this bit of explanation in a NY Times review by Hilarie M. Sheets of Opie's mid-career survey taking place now at the Guggenheim Museum.
Another current project is photographing high-school football players around the country. Rather than snapping the perfect catch or play, she chooses moments in between the action on the field, capturing the American cultural landscape from a different angle. “I’m very empathic to the construction of masculinity within our culture and how we build these identities up,” Ms. Opie said. She pointed out that [her son] Oliver’s father, Mr. Hill, had been the 6-foot-4-inch teenage gay boy with the football coach father. The political and personal are inextricably linked for Ms. Opie.
“At first I had the little boy who wanted to wear the pink tutu and dress up,” she said. “Because he’s not in a traditional household with a football coach dad, he was never ashamed. Now I have a 6-year-old who only wants to play Pokémon and kill aliens on the Xbox.”
She hasn’t decided which she likes better. “He’s now very aware of the social structure of masculinity,” she said. “He’s trying it on and seeing what it feels like.”
I still feel the football series is weak, distant, but I applaud the effort to capture the build-up, like clay on an armature, of the "social structure of masculinity." It is an elusive thing, to catch its effect on consciousness—an imprint on flesh, as it were, the buckling on of body armor: knee pads, face guards, or lipstick on little girls. Perhaps because personal social construct is hard to define, let alone pin down, it demands intimacy. And, I suppose, persistence. It won't be long, Oliver will be in High School.
Photo of Oliver in tutu courtesy of Regen Projects.
