“The Freeways are the architecture that will be left behind like the pyramids in Egypt.”

Catherine Opie (b. 1961). Untitled #1 (Freeways), 1994. Platinum print, edition of 5, 2 1/4 x 6 3/4 inches

Since the 1950s the California highway system has played a vital role in the formation and development of the Los Angeles metro area. During the mid-1990s Catherine Opie found herself using this highway system regularly. While commuting each day, Opie first began to notice the beauty of the interstate concrete. “I’d start watching these shapes and these forms, and I’d just be like, ‘God, you know, these are really kind of phenomenal structures.’ I thought about that for a good year before I went out with a camera and figured out how I wanted to do it.” The result was a new series of photographs that focuses on freeways as icons of Southern California.

Opie’s Freeways (1994–95) represent a departure from her previous work. Instead of the vibrant colors and vertical orientation of her earlier Portraits series, for Freeways Opie used a panoramic camera, and a labor-intensive platinum process to produce a series of forty small, matte, tonal images. Exhibited together, they look less like a journalistic photo-essay than a quiet, almost mournful meditation on the dubious success of a system that was conceived as a means of connecting suburban and urban areas. Opie herself states, “the freeways separate communities, but I would say that the biggest thing they do is separate the city from the suburb….”

In order to eliminate people and automobiles from her compositions, Opie photographed early on weekend mornings. Emptying the freeways stripped them of their functionality, providing a rare view of the structures themselves and highlighting their systematic organization. Opie imbued the works with a kind of timelessness, veering toward abstraction in her views of swooping overpasses set against muted skies. In many images the freeway structures look like all that remains of human culture in some post-apocalyptic future. As Opie has noted, the series bears a strong connection to the early photographs of the Egyptian pyramids taken by Maxime Du Camp in the mid-nineteenth century.

Opie had originally intended to print the Freeways in a large mural format, but when she reviewed her initial contact prints, she decided that the grandiose architecture would be more effective rendered small. Indeed, her images’ miniature scale and rich tonality lend them an intimacy that forces viewers to reconsider these structures, which, especially for an audience living in Southern California, govern their daily movements. The beauty and even tenderness with which Opie represents the freeways hints at a certain collective appreciation, a sense that they are a true common ground, what she has called “our monuments to Southern California.”

• As a class brainstorm a list of adjectives you would use to describe this image. Discuss the communal list—are there any surprises or disagreements?
• Opie herself seems to be ambivalent about these structures. While fully admiring their grandeur she also notices how they separate communities, and create demarcations between city and suburb. Depending on whether you live in the midst of a busy city, the suburbs, or a rural community this image may seem more or less familiar to you and may hold different associations. Discuss your response to this image. Is it primarily positive, negative, or mixed?
• In speaking about the Freeways, Opie says, “I was originally going to make them huge. But then I started looking at the contact prints, and I started thinking about that whole nineteenth–century language, and I realized that they had to be small.” Draw a rectangle that is 2 1/4 x 6 3/4 inches to represent the scale of this work. Do you agree with Opie’s choice? How would the impact of this photo change if it were very large?

• Opie underscores the enormous mass of these structures by shooting the images from the ground to emphasize their looming monumentality. Imagine this image from other vantage points—as a traveler along the freeway or from a helicopter, surveying it from above. How does your point of view impact your response?
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• Photograph a structure from various points of view:
  
  • As though you were an ant, looking up
  • From above as though you were a bird flying over
  • From a distance
  • Close-up
  Strive to convey a different impact from each of these photos even though the subject remains the same. Share your results with your classmates and consider which vantage points are most effective and why.
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• Opie has compared this series to the French photographer Maxime Du Camp’s documents of the pyramids that he took on a trip to Egypt in the mid-1800s. Discuss how Du Camp’s photo is similar to Opie’s and how it is different.
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• Opie’s Freeways considers mortality and the passage of time. The lack of human presence in these photographs eerily suggests monuments of a glorious lost civilization haunted by long since departed inhabitants. Many artists, writers, and filmmakers have explored this futuristic theme. A recent book, The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, offers another look at humanity's impact on the planet, and asks us to envision our earth post-humanity. In any artistic medium, create your own vision of a world without human beings. Discuss your work and your response to this idea.
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