Catherine Opie

“The Surfers are large-scale colour photographs of seascapes taken along the Malibu coastline and portraits of surfers standing on the shore just after emerging from the water.

The Surfers were created after Opie returned from a one year residency at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where she created the Icehouse series. Both the Icehouses and the Surfers are part of Opie’s ongoing series focusing on American cities and landscapes. The Surfers were photographed in the morning when the light fog in the air faintly obscures the horizon line, causing the water’s edge to seamlessly fade into the sky. Like the Icehouses, the Surfers document a community defined by a landscape.”