“I started photographing when I was nine. I recently reprinted my first two rolls of film, and I realized that nothing had really changed. I’m still doing portraits; I’m still doing houses. I’m still doing things in the neighborhood... I documented my whole neighborhood when I was nine... Taking photographs is all I’ve ever wanted to do. It’s how I think.”

Catherine Opie (b. 1961). Sunday Morning Breakfast, 2004. Chromogenic print, 20 x 16 inches, edition of 5

In and Around Home (2004–05) is Opie’s most personal series. It invites us into the artist’s day-to-day surroundings and allows us to engage with various components of her everyday life. This includes the interior and safety of her home, the community that she lives in, and the jarring and unexpected moments that can invade and startle our everyday calm. The images show how information and current events make their way into this domestic setting through television, newspapers, and community response. The series focuses on family, but also acknowledges the local, national, and global forces that enter and act upon it.

The photograph Sunday Morning Breakfast shows Opie’s son Oliver as he plays with two dogs. It is early morning and we can see his half-eaten breakfast on a plate. No family is isolated from the world that surrounds it, and the series explores this porous boundary through the inclusion of Polaroids that focus on the most common way that the outside world enters the home: through television news media. Shot off the TV screen, the Polaroids preserve the most fleeting of visual information, including glimpses of the 2004 presidential debates between George W. Bush and John Kerry, coverage of Terry Schiavo’s impending euthanasia, and in one late work, the flooding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The images of current events signify the larger world coursing through the lives of Opie, her family, and her neighbors.

As Opie stated in a 2006 interview, “Life is very complex . . . and I think that we forget that we have these ways of containing everything . . . one of the things I wanted this body of work to do is move you in and out . . . . I’m a tenured professor at UCLA, I have a wonderful family, I own a home . . . . Should I be complacent at this point because I’m living my American Dream? And I feel that as an artist it’s my responsibility not to be completely complacent, to try to create a weave of complexity through images and looking at the world, and ideas of the history of photography as well as the history of culture . . . and to still stay really aware of that and give that back to an audience.”

• Before showing the image, tell students that they are about to see a photograph titled Sunday Morning Breakfast. Ask them to imagine the photo that they expect to see, and perhaps do a quick sketch to document their ideas. Brainstorm a list of all the things they think will be included.
• Show Sunday Morning Breakfast. How is it similar to your expectations? How is it different? How many of the things on the list are in the photo?
• Describe your response to a Sunday morning breakfast at Catherine Opie’s house. What does this photograph suggest to you about her home, her family, her lifestyle?
• Would you like to be invited over for Sunday morning breakfast at Opie’s house? Explain your response.

• What is Sunday morning like at your house? Each student should create a Sunday morning breakfast photograph and/or essay that reflects their own personal experience. Bring them into class and review them together. What are the similarities? What are the differences? What are the surprises?
  Visual Arts


• In this series Opie intersperses 16 x 20-inch full-color photographs of her home, family, and neighborhood with 4 3/16 x 3 1/2-inch Polaroids of images from the television news. Why might she make this distinction and use different media to capture these moments?
  Social Studies


• In and Around Home documents a series of moments that occur inside Opie’s home, in her neighborhood, and those that are transmitted into her home via television. Although news events enter our consciousness daily through a steady stream of media, certain extraordinary events penetrate our usual immunity and we remember forever where we were when we became aware of them. For one generation of Americans it was the bombing of Pearl Harbor, for another it was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Another generation remembers the attack on the World Trade Center. Have you ever had your everyday life interrupted or surprised by an important news event? When was it? What was it? Tell the story of that moment.
  Social Studies


• Opie has said, “I’m kind of a twisted social documentary photographer.” She acknowledges the early influence of several American documentary photographers including Lewis Hine (1874–1940), Dorothea Lange (1895–1966), Walker Evans (1903–1975), Berenice Abbott (1898–1991), Margaret Bourke-White (1904–1971), and Helen Levitt (b. 1913). Research the work of one of these photographers and compare their approach to Opie’s.
  Visual Arts
  
  Social Studies