In the mid-1990s, Catherine Opie did a series of portraits of the gay, lesbian, transgender, and drag performance communities in San Francisco and Los Angeles—richly saturated large-format color photographs that would become her best-known work to date. Her mid-career retrospective, showing at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, through January 7, 2009, includes concurrent and recent landscape, documentary, and urban street photography; work that ranges from the curiously common and flat—the labyrinthine streets of downtown Manhattan—to the disquietingly beautiful and provocative (see the tender and nostalgic platinum prints of freeways from the mid-90s, as well as the mesmerizing Icehouses series). Still, it is the mid–late 90s portraits that have the bold-stroke of artistic power that occasion a retrospective. These photographs are the reason we are here. Traversing over ten years of shifting social terrain, they are still very charged.