Artist Catherine Opie on the Vatican — an outsider’s view of an arcane world

In May 2021, the American artist Catherine Opie arrived in Rome for a six-week residency at the American Academy. Replacing her far-reaching view in Los Angeles, from the Frank Gehry apartment block that she calls home, here she found herself gazing down upon the Italian capital from an apartment in the Academy’s Villa Aurelia — a 17th-century mansion perched on the Gianicolo hill. On her second day, she was invited to the Vatican to photograph the swearing-in of the Swiss Guard, which protects the Pope.

“I was late,” she laughs. “The old American lady with the camera, who couldn’t find the right private porch where it was all taking place.” Once there, however, the ceremony, which has taken place annually on the same day for hundreds of years, proved pivotal to her project, which had been given a loose proviso of “the idea of the city”. “It’s like the secret service,” she says of the Vatican experience. “The outfits . . . the pageantry. It’s a weird military parade taking place inside this closed space circumscribed by ancient ideas and old laws derived from what’s written in the Bible.”

The Vatican City, a place that creates its own systems and norms, is a queer one, Opie decided, and she wanted to bring to it her own queer eye. “After that ceremony,” she says, “I didn’t want to be on the inside.” She decided to conduct her photographic project independently.

For the next six weeks, Opie and her camera visited the Vatican City daily to construct an outsider’s view of this arcane world, which sustains rules that govern 1.4bn lives. Her ability to dig into its every corner and luxuriate in its spaces was facilitated by the lingering pandemic lockdown: she had access because it was open to the few — scholars, researchers — not the usual masses. “Quite often it would be me and three others in the Sistine Chapel,” she says. The results will go on show this month in Naples.

Opie, who is a very youthful 62, has become one of the finest narrators of American life through her carefully crafted imagery. At first she focused on her own queer community in Los Angeles — leather-wearing lesbian women in man-drag depicted in exquisitely still, vibrantly coloured portraits that owe a debt to the clarity of Holbein and the internal mystery of Vermeer. Since then her 40-year career has — through images of elegiac landscapes, young football players, lesbian families, corporate architecture, political protests, freeways and a lingering study of the home of Elizabeth Taylor — delved into issues of community and identity, politics and power. She has also turned the camera on herself, her arms pierced with multiple pins, her skin bleeding from words and pictures she has cut into her own flesh.

For Opie, whose background is decidedly non-religious, it was the historical and subcultural nature of the Vatican that resonated. “The Vatican has its own government, and I wanted to work out the relationship of this governance to humanity,” says Opie, who was “significantly exposed” to the values of Catholicism through her ex-wife of 21 years who was from a “very Catholic” family in Louisiana. “The Catholic world is intolerant and authoritarian. This body of work examines that,” she says. “I wouldn’t label the Vatican as dystopian, it’s too important to too many people. But there is hypocrisy there.”

Opie had tried to make work outside of the US before. She gleefully recounts how she failed to do so in New Zealand and Venice. “So much of my work is consistent with the American identity,” she says. “So when I was in Venice, I tried to show what Venice was to Canaletto and what it is now, and all I did was make nice pictures that looked like they’d been taken by a tourist. But in the Vatican, I found a structural development.” Splitting the project into three parts, Opie has focused on the City’s soaring old walls; the hundreds of windows that punctuate its buildings; and the multiple images of blood that wash across its huge collection of art.

The walls, shot with a panoramic camera turned vertically, are revealed to be cameras in themselves, each fitted with a — sometimes barely visible — surveillance apparatus. They suggest both the physical and metaphorical fortress of a sometimes oppressive Catholic faith, but are equally a landscape, alive with vegetation that grows freely in the cracks and crevices, a lesson that man cannot suppress nature.

The windows evoke a world that can be opened and closed, that is always tightly framed. In a parting shot, Opie shows the Pope waving from one on his papal balcony, as he does every Sunday. “You look up at him from the piazza,” she says, “and his importance to people is something really quite surreal.”

But for those familiar with her work, it is the images of blood that will resonate the most. Blood, after all, has other connotations in the queer lexicon — in the US, for many years gay men were not allowed to donate it — and it flows through her work as a motif of injustice and judgment as well as humanity. With her camera, Opie has closed in on paintings and tapestries, to create grids of fragmented gore, like a slasher storyboard.

“I wanted to create a Modernist framework for this history of violence,” she says. “To give it a profoundly rigid structure, to understand the relationship of blood to the Vatican.” While Opie’s own images of flesh wounds are sometimes accompanied by trigger warnings when shown in art galleries, in the Vatican she found pictures of children about to be slaughtered, of knives penetrating limbs, of blood gushing from the torsos of men and horses, all in the name of religious intolerance and social control. “We need to be shocked by it, otherwise we just perpetuate the presence of violence. We need to stop proliferating wars.

“I’m not Lewis Hine,” she continues, referring to the 20th-century sociologist and photographer whose images of children at work helped bring about laws against child labour. “I’m not going to create social change in my pictures, but I still think I can help to start a conversation.” In these revelatory images, she seems to have done rather more than that.

‘Walls, Windows and Blood’ runs at Thomas Dane Gallery, Naples, September 19-November 18, thomasdanegallery.com