American photographer Catherine Opie was BOTD in 1961. Born in Sandusky, Ohio, she became interested in photography after discovering the work of Lewis Hine. After requesting a camera for her ninth birthday, she began taking photographs of her family and neighbourhood, creating her own darkroom to develop her images. She and her family moved to California in 1975, and she studied at the San Francisco Art Institute and the California Institute of the Arts. She settled in Los Angeles with her then-partner, the painter Julie Burleigh, working together as artists and constructing studios in their backyard. Her 1990s photography collections Being and Having and Portraits depicted a variety of identities in Los Angeles’ LGBTQ community, presenting drag kings, cross dressers and trans subjects in heroic and iconographic poses, inspired by Renaissance paintings. She is perhaps best known for her 1993 photograph Self-Portrait/Cutting, in which she sits with her back to the camera, the skin of her back displaying a freshly carved and bloodied childlike tattoo of two women holding hands, and 1994’s Self-Portrait/Pervert, in which her face is encased in a rubber fetish mask, with self-drawn tattoos and spikes embedded in her arms. Both portraits generated significant controversy and significant debate: her supporters praised Opie’s depiction of lesbian BDSM identity, drawing comparisons with the work of Nan Goldin and Robert Mapplethorpe, while critics condemned her for glorifying bodily mutilation. Opie’s other work includes Freeways, a study of deserted highways around Los Angeles; Domestic, a series of portraits of lesbian couples in their homes; Wall Street, in which she photographed New York’s financial district emptied of people; a series of portraits of the actress Elizabeth Taylor; and Around Home, in which she presented images of her community as a microcosm for the political and social conflicts surrounding the 2004 re-election of President George W. Bush. Opie lives in Los Angeles, where she is a professor of photography at the University of California.