His work often deals with such themes as death, corpses (and sometimes dismembered portions thereof), and various outsiders such as dwarves, transsexuals, hermaphrodites, and physically deformed people. Witkin's complex tableaux often recall religious episodes or classical paintings.I'm not going to post any of his works here, apart from the two below - the only ones I found at all interesting and non-stomach-churning. For any passing reader with a strong stomach who'd be interested in seeing examples, do go HERE, HERE, or HERE (scroll down for the illustrations at third link).
 |
| Night in a Small Town (2007) |
 |
| Cupid and Centaur (1992) |
There's a very good article by Cintra Wilson at Salon from 2000:
Joel-Peter Witkin
Is his darkly imaginative photography an intellectually camouflaged freak show or high art?
I'm going to take the liberty of borrowing a paragraph or two from it here.
My main reason for featuring this photographer/artist is because of his birth date. Sun and numerous other planets all in Virgo, seemed to me to be at odds with his choice of subject material.
Some pointers in random paragraphs from Cintra Wilson's piece:
His father was a Jewish glazier, his mother a Roman Catholic who worked in a DDT plant. His parents were unable to transcend their religious differences and the two divorced when Witkin was young, the boy remaining with his mother.
In his 1998 book “The Bone House,” Witkin claims that his unique visual sensibilities began to churn when, as a small child, he witnessed a terrible car accident in front of his home, in which a little girl was decapitated. He recalls her head rolling to his feet, her dead eyes staring upward. Witkin also cites urban crime photographer Weegee as an early influence.
(Note my Learning Curve OTE post on Weegee is HERE).
He has been the reigning king of deviant imagery — indeed, the thinking Goth’s favorite artist — since he came to public acclaim in the 1980s with his delicately posed corpses and bravely naked mutants, floridly arranged in beaten-silvertone, antique nightmare-scapes.
Over the years he’d developed an involved and zealous process for making his prints, which resulted in the silvery, found-antique quality his work became known for. Witkin scratches the negatives, then prints them through tissue paper to fuzz the texture of the image, giving the prints a specifically blurry, “timeless” quality. He then mounts the image on aluminum and applies pigments by hand. Finally, he covers the photographs with hot beeswax and reheats them, then cools and polishes. With this procedure, Witkin, a rabid perfectionist, produces an average of 10 of his coldly luxurious finished prints in a year.
Witkin’s subject matter is, in fact, atrocity itself, or anyone who looks like a victim of it, by accident or unfortunate birth. In 1985, he ran this advertisement to solicit models, asking the following people to contact him:
"Pinheads, dwarfs, giants, hunchbacks, pre-op transsexuals, bearded women, people with tails, horns, wings, reversed hands or feet, anyone born without arms, legs, eyes, breast, genitals, ears, nose, lips. All people with unusually large genitals. All manner of extreme visual perversion. Hermaphrodites and teratoids (alive and dead). Anyone bearing the wounds of Christ."Witkin succeeded in reaching so many amputees, pre-operative transsexuals and other pinnacles of unseen society as modeling fodder that in 1989 he added to his original request: “women whose faces are covered with hair or large skin lesions willing to pose in evening gowns. People who live as comic-book heroes, boot, corset and bondage fetishists. Anyone claiming to be God. God.”
God is a big theme for Witkin. Like many good perverts, Witkin seems to suffer from what I like to call “Catholic burn.” As a practicing Roman Catholic, he appears to be obsessed with the fetishizing of everything nasty on the fringes of Jesus’ world, of all the “other” stuff ordinarily shunned by suburban philistines and the religiously repressed: freaks, violated corpses, fists up the ass, bondage, etc.
But Witkin routinely insists it’s not for prurient reasons. Oh, no. His work is a product of his higher religious leanings: “The images tended to repel and shock. Yet, I believe they possessed tender and enlightened qualities which were strangely moving … the figures were always isolated because the Sacred is always beyond nature, beyond existence.”
.... often claims to see himself as “loving the unloved, the damaged, the outcasts,” and such unconditional acceptance characterizes his work in general: like St. Francis of Assisi, who drank the pus of lepers in order to overcome his repulsion of them, Witkin is not a rubbernecker, an exploiter or a pessimist, but one who says Yes to everything questionable, even to the terrible. Why would you want to say Yes to death, dismemberment, or any of the other staples in Witkin’s banquet of the bizarre? It’s sort of like an extreme form of multiculturalism, a respect for that which is drastically foreign to you, even terrifying.
The work is beautiful enough to be “real art,” but it is still an intellectually camouflaged, carny peep show of the most debased and obvious water. You can put as many flowery wreaths and as much gorgeous photo technique as you want around a dead baby, and it will be art, yes, but it is still a dead baby. It is still a sideshow for the morbidly curious, regardless of how much Witkin may drone on about the deeply religious quality of his work.
For a slightly different take on Witkin and his work there's a piece by photographer Richard Emblin at Black Star Rising HERE.
Emblin describes Witkin;
...As a staunch “traditionalist” in his modus operandi, he has embraced Catholicism and a Jewish work ethic. While critics have employed many adjectives to describe his visual undertakings from “dark” to “morbid,” he is anything but; a man whose smile spans the Williamsburg bridge, can light up a conversation in seconds and whose eyes flicker like fully-charged strobes, whenever a joke is made.
I can find no time of birth, so chart is set for 12 noon on 15 September 1939, Brooklyn, NYC.
That certainly describes a Virgo-type. Some of those Virgo planets are linked together in a Grand Trine in Earth signs (a kind of harmonious circuit), which links most of the Virgo planets to Mars and Uranus in the other Earth signs, Capricorn and Taurus respectively. As an everyday personality Witkin could well be the "feet- on-the-ground" guy I'd expect from an Earth Grand Trine, but somehow, once his muse kicks in, his feet are led to the darkness below ground. Venus, Neptune and Uranus are bound up in this Grand Trine, so his artistic impulses are led to the unusual, unexpected and highly creative. Not directly by Pluto, as might be expected though; Pluto is at 2 Leo, in trine to Jupiter in Aries. Perhaps Jupiter's reputation for excess, linked to Pluto's darkness and deathly implications, somehow play into Witkin's need for a kind of peculiar perfection.
All his natal planets are in Earth or Fire signs, no Water or Air, unless either element had been added via unknown sign on the ascendant angle. I'd hazard a guess at the obvious one: Scorpio, to add a bit of dark Watery passion into the mix.
Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).
