Born in 1939 in Brooklyn, New York (US)
Lives and works in Albuquerque, New Mexico (US)
1983
Black and white photograph, gelatin-silver print
70 x 70 cm
Year of Purchase: 1988
Joël-Peter Witkin’s black and white photographs present extravagant characters with deformed and deviant bodies. A masked women suckles an eel, a man drives an 8-inch nail into his nose, a transsexual being suffers a dog’s sexual assaults… All morbid tales, leftovers of timeless eccentricity, which tend to show that ‘beauty is a cultural and social notion, and invariably the outcome of propaganda1’. Before the digital age, Witkin invented a world which thwarts all moral and aesthetic canons. He defines his role as ‘that of a shaman, a priest and a mystic, capable of dealing with the imperious dialogue between the visible and the invisible2’. In extending the lessons learned from photographers like Weegee and Diane Arbus, fascinated by crime and abnormality, the American photographer pushes their approach to the limit, to the point of using corpses in his ‘living pictures’. By enclosing his studio with grey drapes, Witkin separates these ‘freaks’ from all reality, thus adding to their unlikely character. His photos, which are scratched, crossed out, and blotched with emulsion, mimic a certain painting. As a representative of 1980s’ postmodernism, he frequently pays tribute to great painters like Miró (here openly quoted in ‘Sins of Miró’), Bosch, Géricault, Goya, and Velazquez, and mixes these references with great myths, and narratives taken from the Bible.
Emmanuelle Lequeux
1 Joël-Peter Witkin, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art of Haifa (Israel), 1991.
2 Idem.