Catherine Opie and Judie Bamber in conversation: “We’re fucking twins!”

The history of art is full of friendships about which we can only speculate: what did Gauguin and Van Gogh talk about? O’Keefe and Kahlo? The nature of these relationships, and so many more besides, is known mostly through scraps of correspondence and comparative visual analysis. Needless to say, these are hardly reliable sources. 

Judie Bamber and Catherine Opie are not leaving their almost four decades of friendship to conjecture alone. The two met in the late 1980s, brought together by the scintillating milieu of the California Institute of the Arts, and have each gone on to become central figures in Los Angeles’s queer art community. Care, collaboration, and familiarity have been constants throughout their careers. 

When we sat down to discuss how their friendship has evolved, Bamber was fresh from the opening of her solo exhibition ‘Details of Impossible Past Lovers’ at GAVLAK Gallery (on view until 28th February), while Opie was preparing for her first major museum exhibition in the UK, ‘To Be Seen’ at the National Portrait Gallery (5th March – 31st May). 

Julian Stern: Do you remember when you first met?

Judie Bamber: [The artist] Larry Johnson had a party. It was after he and I had graduated from CalArts, and Cathy was still a student – this was 1988. I remember meeting her, and she said to Larry, Where are all the dykes?! I wasn’t out at the time. 

Catherine Opie: I remember being very intimidated because these were all the cool kids who were already showing in LA. I never felt like I was part of the cool kids at all, and it was a lot of cigarettes and a lot of drinking. 

JB: A lot of drinking. 

CO: I’m sure we were stoned as well. 

JS: Did you become instant friends?

CO: We were born on the same day and same year, so we immediately liked each other. We’re fucking twins! And I just think Judie Bamber is the coolest thing in the world. I was trying to hang out with her and watch Twin Peaks. 

JB: We hung out a lot. We would go to the Korean spa and then for sushi. We would have dinner parties. 

JS: Can you pinpoint when artistic collaboration entered the dynamic?

CO: It began right away. 

JB: Before I did the vulva paintings, Cathy came over and we photographed each other’s vaginas. That helped me figure out how to take the reference images.

CO: We were shooting two and a quarter. 

JB: When I actually came to do the project, I went to Cathy’s studio and invited a bunch of women. I took everyone behind a screen and we did a Polaroid and then the color two and a quarter. Everyone had them out on a table and was looking and comparing, mimosas in hand.

CO: A vagina party. 

JS: Judie, you often paint from photography, and Cathy, you’re photographing from a history of painting – a perfect chiasmus.

CO: I said to Judie the other day, I wish you could teach me how to paint. But there’s no way that I could ever paint the way I would wanna paint because Judie already fulfills that desire in me.

JB: Sometimes I wish I was a photographer. I work in series, much like a photographer does. I like to draw out aspects of images that were not intended to be looked at closely. In Cathy’s work, she does that with the photograph itself.

CO: I fight with the identity of what photography is. I’m very happy that the Pictures Generation predates me because it allowed me to frame my work in a more conceptual way. And I think that’s why I’ve leaned into painting so much as a conversation within my own work. 

JS: It’s so interesting that you talk about your relationship in terms of being twins. Do you see yourselves as sisters more than anything else? Was that the kind of intimacy required to, for example, cut the picture into Cathy’s back for her self-portrait?

JB: When I did the cutting, I felt so connected to your body and so aware of your breathing, your movement, and what you were feeling – while trying not to go too deeply with the scalpel. Not being a part of the kink community, it was totally unfamiliar to me. And then afterwards, I had this endorphin rush. 

CO: You wanted a cigarette so badly. 

JB: I felt like I got an insight into what that community might be about when the activity is not genital contact, but another sort of physical intimacy. I don’t want to give you all the credit for me coming out, but you were very instrumental in that transition.

CO: Judie’s family. I don’t know if she’s a sister, because family doesn’t necessarily mean a nuclear family structure, so I don’t want to use sister in that way, but I think we’re of each other’s blood. And she certainly opened my blood and that made us part of each other’s blood as well. 

JB: When you come out of such a strong kind of community-based school such as CalArts, you have to also think about what art school did for us. 

CO: That was really big. And our schools are now closing. I mean, there are no more schools in San Francisco – it’s unbelievable. Art school in the 80s set us up for an artistic community outside if you stayed in Los Angeles to a certain extent. 

JS: Do you think of yourselves as Angelinos, then? 

JB: LA is my chosen home. I went to CalArts because I wanted to be in California. I have a big community here that feels like family because I’ve known them since I was 18. I also like the isolation of LA. I can see people and there’s all kinds of stuff to do. But I can also stay in my house and work. 

CO: That’s one of the reasons why I like it here as well. In LA, you’re hunkered down, and when you choose to see each other, it’s your choice. 

JS: That really resonates with everything you were saying about family beyond the nuclear structure and blood bonds in the self-portrait. 

CO: So many people don’t even know that Judie did the cutting and how important our relationship is to me. That photograph was taken in my living room, and it came out of love and community at a particular moment in LA. Yet the piece has become this iconic image. It has travelled in a way that I never expected from what I asked Judie to do – and so I think that I’m really protective of that work. 

JS: That’s something that rings true beyond just that one photo. In the work that you both make, there’s a desire to lay claim to specific subject positions – whether it’s by centering the most sensitive part of the female body or by bearing the paraphernalia of a certain sub-community. But isn’t there also a protective impulse, a desire not to reveal everything, to keep some things veiled or out of the frame? 

CO: Judie and I were completely interested in the idea of fetish and asking what is fetish. But we don’t want to be fetishised for that now.

JB: I’ve never really thought of this before, but when you were doing those early portraits of people against coloured backdrops, I was painting the objects on coloured backgrounds, trying to evoke the body without showing it. The objects were actual size, but the paintings were fairly small because I wanted people to have to get close and really look at something. And you were presenting those individuals to be looked at and to be seen. 

CO: Yeah, total cross-pollination. 

JB: Since then, we have gone on to have our own separate careers and we were teaching in different places. 

CO: I had a kid. Life just gets really hectic in a big city. We’ve seen each other now three days in a row, and that probably hasn’t happened since the 90s, to be honest. We had a really good time at the Photo Booth Museum yesterday. It was hilarious!

JS: I was in Silverlake recently and walked past that museum, and I was like, what is that?

CO: That is a money-maker. That’s what that is. Why didn’t we think of it? 

JB: Is it too late to invest? 

CO: There was this moment when we couldn’t understand why our picture wasn’t in the strip from the machine. And there was this young person so we said, Oh, by the way, we don’t think that machine works. And she looked at us and—

JB: She was like, It’s okay, we know how to use it.

CO: Like, excuse us! 

JB: Sorry, millennial. It’s not our first time either! 

CO: But now that Judie and I are retired from teaching, we’re gonna try to spend more time together, right? Next time I see you, it might be in London. 

JB: I hope so.