Photographer Catherine Opie

We Have to Put Everything Into Our Fight for Trans Rights

Catherine Opie is an artist and educator working with photography, film, collage, and ceramics. Opie’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States and is held in over 50 major collections throughout the world. Before taking part in the Zócalo, Thomas Mann House, and L.A. Review of Books program “Must Artists Be Activists?”—part of the two-day conference “Arts in Times of Crises”—Opie joined us in the green room to talk about growing up in Ohio, political memorabilia, and cruising in Griffith Park.

December 8, 2023

Zahara Gómez Lucini holds a microphone with mouth open in mid-speak. She wears a green t-shirt and stands in a kitchen, with an oven behind her.

Photographer Zahara Gómez Lucini

I’d Serve the Aliens Aguachile

September 22, 2023

Zahara Gómez Lucini is a photographer focused on the victims of forced disappearance, forensic work, and clandestine graves in Latin America. She worked together with Las Rastreadoras del Fuerte in …

The Journalist Who Photographed the Burning Monk

The Man Behind an Iconic Vietnam War Image Captured ‘the Ugliest Events of Our Time’

by Ray E. Boomhower | June 8, 2023

While President John F. Kennedy was talking by phone with his brother, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, on the morning of Tuesday, June 12, 1963, he suddenly exclaimed: “Jesus …

A Fragile Livelihood in Yemen

Photojournalist Asmaa Waguih Captures a Nation at War, at Work, at Rest

by Solomon Moore | June 1, 2022

Cairo-based photojournalist Asmaa Waguih has always felt a close connection to Yemen, her Red Sea neighbor. Her father was an Egyptian military officer who fought in the country for many …

The Photo Album That Succeeded Where Pancho Villa Failed

The Revolutionary May Have Tried to Find My Grandfather by Raiding a New Mexico Village—But a Friend’s Camera Truly Captured Our Family Patriarch

by Stacey Ravel Abarbanel | February 2, 2022

For a long time—at first sporadically but lately in hot pursuit—I’ve been looking for Sam. Sam is Sam Ravel, my paternal grandfather. I scour the indexes of history books for …

Where I Go: The Geology of Memory | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

Where I Go: The Headlands of Yehliu

It Took Me 20 Years and Five Visits to Develop My Own Relationship to Taiwan

by Shin Yu Pai | September 15, 2021

I was hiking the Port Orford Heads State Park on the coast of Southern Oregon this summer when I realized how closely the rock formations and coastline resemble the rugged …

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