Catherine Opie’s series Domestic grew from her
questioning her sense of community and how it was inflected by her lesbian
identity. In the mid-1990s, she traveled across the country to photograph
lesbian families in a series of sensitively and beautifully rendered group portraits.
In this photograph, open doors and windows signify freedom and directness,
matching coffee cups signal the close family structure, and an open chair in the
foreground invites the viewer to enter the scene. This scene of cozy
domesticity is an affirmation of her subjects’ status as a family unit and a
celebration of the warmth and informality of their shared lives.