Around the time she was completing her celebrated Being and Having (1991) series, Opie began work on a number of seminal images that would come to be known as the Portraits (1993-97). During this period, she regularly travelled from Los Angeles to participate in the sadomasochistic leather subculture, which was flourishing underground in San Francisco. Whereas Being and Having approached identity from a conceptual viewpoint, parodying the notions of cohesive gender and masquerade alike, with Portraits Opie’s work took a serious turn to depict subjects who were grappling with socially enforced gender constructions and their implications on their daily lives. The images depict her close friends from within the West Coast leather community: transvestites, transsexuals, drag queens, body manipulators and others who use the body as a site of sexual and aesthetic experimentation.

Formal in both pose and presentation, the series calls to mind the history of Italian Renaissance, Baroque portraiture, and the grandeur of courtly Naples. The sequence of elegant, gorgeously coloured photographs embue their subjects with a regal dignity presenting a revisionist history of portraiture, where bruises, tattoos, or piercings are worn as proudly as a coat of arms. As Opie observed “The photographs stare back, or they stare through you. They’re very royal. I say that my friends are like my royal family.”