She’s the viewfinder

When artist Cindy Sherman curated a show of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs at Sean Kelly Gallery in New York last year, she created both a portrait of Mapplethorpe and a self-portrait of sorts. “Eye to Eye” included several portraits echoing the work for which Sherman is best known -- film stills in which she portrays invented characters.

Now, Los Angeles photographer Catherine Opie presents her selection of Mapplethorpe images at Marc Selwyn Fine Art gallery, in “Pictures, Pictures” on view through March 13. The show presents a different view of Mapplethorpe by a very different artist.

Inspired by the show in New York, Selwyn wanted a Los Angeles artist to curate his show of Mapplethorpe work. On the advice of Ann Philbin, director of the UCLA Hammer Museum in Westwood, he contacted Opie.

Unlike Sherman, a Mapplethorpe contemporary who was photographed by him, Opie was a graduate student in the late ‘80s and came of age as an artist admiring the older photographer.

Opie’s work -- pictures of freeways, vernacular architecture, as well as portraits of Malibu surfers and lesbian families -- bears little resemblance to Mapplethorpe’s. It has been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Guggenheim Museum and Whitney Museum of Art in New York and other institutions here and abroad.

Currently a professor of photography at UCLA, Opie first received attention about a decade ago with her portraits of male and female transvestites and transsexuals.

Given her own subject matter, “most people may have thought I would have gone for the tougher work,” she says on a recent morning in the gallery. And although she included examples of what Mapplethorpe Foundation President Michael Strout refers to as “the difficult pictures” -- nudes, leather and sadomasochism -- Opie wanted to show a lesser known side of the photographer. “I didn’t want it to be Mapplethorpe’s best hits,” she says of “Pictures, Pictures.”

The foundation made available the 2,000 images in its archives, and Opie chose 44: self-portraits, flowers and portraits, including pictures of the collector Sam Wagstaff, poet and rock icon Patti Smith, author William Burroughs “and Arnold -- how could I resist?”

The photo of California’s governor hangs next to one of a man in a leather mask and above an image of two shirtless men, embraced in a dance, each wearing a crown.

“He was a pop culture icon in a very different way than Patti Smith,” Opie says of Schwarzenegger. “I love the straight-on gaze and the juxtaposition with the leather mask. You can almost imagine it’s his face behind it.”

During Mapplethorpe’s life, some critics charged him with opportunism -- that by photographing those who already had fame, he created another layer of celebrity for himself. “But he did that and still kept true to his other subjects,” says Opie, who says she owns every book published about him. (In 1999, she even created her “O portfolio” as a response to his “X Portfolio” of sexually themed work.)

Born in Queens to a Catholic family in 1946, Mapplethorpe studied art at the Pratt Institute in New York before embarking on a career as a photographer. Favoring black-and-white images lighted to appear almost sculptural, he also experimented with color. (At Marc Selwyn, one wall is dedicated to large-scale dye-transfer prints.) His career took off in the 1970s with portraits of friends, lovers and celebrities, including Smith and Wagstaff, who both straddled all three categories.

Mapplethorpe traveled the worlds of the Chelsea Hotel, Max’s Kansas City and the S&M; underground in New York. When he died from AIDS in 1989 at age 43, he had achieved success as well as notoriety for his homoerotic images. Just months before he died, he attended the reception for a large show of his work at the Whitney.

Although he was not overtly political during his life, he was thrust into the spotlight a few months after his death when his work became a focus in the culture wars. Sen. Jesse Helms and other conservative lawmakers demanded funding cuts for the National Endowment for the Arts, lambasting its support of such artists as Mapplethorpe.

As a result of the controversy, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., canceled a planned Mapplethorpe retrospective, “The Perfect Moment.” When the show went ahead a year later at Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center, police swept in, ordering visitors to leave. Director Dennis Barrie was tried on an obscenity charge but was acquitted.

Selecting the images for this show, Opie’s greatest challenge was “how to incorporate the tougher images and still keep it within that same language. It had to come back to form -- that was the key.”

To structure the show, she mapped thumbnail images on a gallery model, making the sequence of images far from coincidental.

Certain themes are repeated -- a metal chain, a gaze -- and Opie creates a literal through line. A pointing boy guides the eyes to a series of photographs along one wall. In the center of nine dye transfer prints arranged on one wall, the petals of an orchid point to four other flowers around it -- an arrangement resembling a game of tic-tac-toe.

Opie decided to open the show with Mapplethorpe’s black-and-white image of a torn American flag from 1977. “People have said I’m a very American photographer. I was thinking about Mapplethorpe like that. Not in the sense of nationalism, but ‘whose America is this?’ ... We live in this country of supposed freedom. Who is that freedom for?”

Next to the flag, she placed a self-portrait, cut to frame only his eyes, taken in 1988, a year before his death.

“That’s one of the most powerful images: ‘Here I am, I know I’m going to die, I’m just going to stare at you,’ ” Opie says. “That photograph makes me want to cry.”

Above his eyes, she placed a picture of his arm, taken a decade previously, creating a triangular relation between the flag, the young body and the older, knowing eyes. “I wanted to bring in politics [surrounding AIDS] without making it obvious,” she says, “in the same way, he was political without being overtly political.”

Although Mapplethorpe was, at times, explicit in his subject matter, he used traditional, formal tropes.

“There’s nothing within the photographs that doesn’t relate back to form,” Opie says. “I wanted to create a sense of his work without the hysterics.”

The sequence of images in “Picture, Picture” offers a definite narrative. It was another way to highlight his formal composition, says Opie, comparing his flowers to Edward Weston’s peppers. “He held on to those older ideas,” she says. “And it’s a hard thing to be a formalist in this day and age.”