Metaphorically, “blue” has two connotations: that which is raw and explicit, and that which is melancholy. While much of Catherine Opie’s work contends with the former, “Holding Blue” deals with the sober subject of climate change. Here, Opie’s photographs capture Norwegian mountain range at “Blue Hour,” when the light casts an ultramarine filter over the land. While on-the-ground observers might be astounded by the mountains’ scale, Opie often restricts her perspective to their peaks, allowing them to be dwarfed by the heavens’ grandeur. “Holding blue,” it turns out, is only possible to an extent: although a photograph might preserve a certain shade of sky, its precise color shifts subtly from image to image, just as the outlines of the rock faces fade in and out of clarity from image to image. Contextualized, these seemingly innocuous landscapes reveal the tragic beauty of an impermanent world, where grey slips into cerulean, cerulean slips into darkness, and ice slips into the sea.

Images: © Catherine Opie, courtesy the artist and Regen Projects.