Catherine Opie – 700 Nimes Road in Beverly Hills (2012)

Louisiana poster with the work, 700 Nimes Road in Beverly Hills (2012), by the American photographer, Catherine Opie (b. 1961). This photograph of Opie became a crowd favorite from day one when Louisiana opened the 2016 exhibit, Illumination—incidentally, an exhibit that delivered the largest amount of new art to the collection in the museum's history.

Actually, Catherine Opie's work is a series, consisting of 50 photographs. Opie, who has otherwise been particularly known for his sometimes hard-boiled depictions of various subcultures, delivers here a both sensitive and sensitive portrait of the Hollywood icon, Elizabeth Taylor's home at the address, 700 Nimes Road in Beverly Hills.

Elizabeth Taylor died in the hospital while Opie was doing the photography, and the series has therefore become a small, sensual monument to a bygone star, equal parts myth and ordinary human life with a mixture of glittering jewels and banal gizmos.