Opie’s practice is predominantly focused on depicted communities that she herself has been a part of, with two notable exceptions: Surfers and High School Football. High School Football, taps into a broader cultural zeitgeist with a series of portraits and landscapes, images gleaned from various states across America. Football is an integral part of the social fabric in communities across America, including Ohio where Opie grew up. There is a universality to the activity that transcends geography, the football pitch acting as a rallying point and space of modern worship.

The activity is coded in the masculine domain, with all the gender complications that this implies. The series presents images of high school aged boys on the verge of manhood. A stylized, masculine armature overlays the young players’ fragility, showing them as both warrior-like and boyish; they embody and elude the cliché of the virile athlete. This embodied tension between the individual and stereotype is a common thread that permeates throughout Opie’s oeuvre.

The landscape images in the series, situate the locals at various distances from Hawaii’s mountains to Ohio’s parking lots, the rigid geometry of the fields creates a universal iconography particular to this American sport. High School Football mines the relationship between individuals and their collective identities. Like the photographs in her Surfers and Freeways series, these images depict uniquely American places and identities, teasing out the complexities of how the individual is both subsumed into and supersedes the universal.