Joel-Peter Witkin

Mr. Witkin's work has always fascinated me. It exists in that same realm of experience as Story of the Eye by Bataille (which changed me forever), The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosiński, the works Hieronymus Bosch, Francisco Goya, and Pieter Breugel. I always imagine these worlds as the everyday turned inside out. All those dark crevasses between our liver and kidneys, the folds of our intestines, their moist accumulations thrust out into the open.

I can't recall who said it now (thought it did come out of Conversation with Contemporary Photographers) but a photographer said, and I paraphrase, that photographs should show us what we cannot see in real life. Of course there are obvious refutations to this statement, but when it comes to 'fine art' photography the observation opens up a very appealing lens of understanding. From what I have read of Witkin he is, among other things, very interested in suffering and pain -- two states which are singularly personal experiences. We cannot know or see the suffering and pain in other people, or animals and plants for that matter. The experience cannot be expressed adequately through language (the wonderful book The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry analyzes the inexpressibility of pain and how in experiencing it a person's world is contracted until noting exists but the pain and its source) nor through conventional documentary photography (do we truly feel the pain of a napalm victim when we look at photograph of them?). Witkin, with his symbolic props and art historically referenced tableaus, seems able, at least for me, to tease out and make visible that timeless and epic suffering. Perhaps because he is able to extract that suffering from the individual/situation in the photograph and present it as Suffering in the universal Plato-esque sense, that it becomes so much more powerful to the viewer.



Abundance, Prague (1997) Joel-Peter Witkin



Satiro (1992) Joel-Peter Witkin



Corpus Medius (2000) Joel-Peter Witkin



Ars Moriendi (2007) Joel-Peter Witkin


This one reminds me of this print I bought years ago. It pictures a traveling prince (or so I gathered form the other images I bought from the book/series) and three princesses buried up to their necks in the ground. Swirling hair just like these heads. The prince looks just as serenely contemplative as this woman, and the princesses just as helpless and possessed as these heads. Do you know the Ronald Dahl short story about this man who agrees to prolong his life by being preserved as merely a brain and a a set of eyes? He is fully conscious but unable to express himself in any way. He is married to a woman who turns out to be a vindictive and cruel, elated at her chance, finally, to take out all her pent up frustrations on the brain in the petri dish. In the last scene I seem to recall that she blows a plume of cigarette smoke into what is left of the man. When they were married he'd never have let her touch a cigarette.