The photographer Catherine Opie's subjects range from gay and lesbian communities to ice houses in Minnesota; as Vince Aletti has written, she "refuses to be pigeonholed." Her current show, "High School Football," on view at Mitchell-Innes & Nash through April 14th is divided between portraits of individual players--lanky, baby-faced boys in ill-fitting armature--and wide-angle landscapes of the field and the game.

Catherine Opie’s collection of photographs currently on view
at Mitchell-Innes & Nash is not a recent body of work, but the series – images of teenage football warriors and their battlefields – finds new life in its first showing in New York.

When I arrived for my visit last fall, Catherine Opie was in her living room with friends, choosing favorites from a group of her portraits of the swimmer Diana Nyad, taken after her recent attempt to navigate the waters between Cuba and Florida. The pictures would soon appear in the New York Times Magazine, to which the photographer contributes when she can find time. 

Well-known for her documentary photography, Catherine Opie has turned her introspective lens to the all-American pastime of high school football in her most recent collection: "Catherine Opie: Figure and Landscape" at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The Los Angeles-based artist became fascinated by the culture of the sport as it relates to the American landscape and the idea of identity after attending several of her nephew's practices and games in Louisiana a few years ago. 

What is it about Catherine Opie and water? Her 2008 mid-career retrospective at New York’s Guggenheim Museum had many fine things in it, but none finer than two water-related series, on surfers and icehouses.

Recently, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York presented two concurrent exhibitions—"Catherine Opie: American Photographer" and "theanyspacewhatever" (curated by Jennifer Blessing and Nancy Spector, respectively)—and unwittingly staged a crucial aesthetic and ethical debate, which, put succinctly, pits "identity politics" against "regional aesthetics."

What began as a study of kinky leather fetishists has become a powerful document of the mainstreaming of gay culture as the Stonewall generation gives way to lesbian soccer moms.