Joel-Peter Witkin

Joel-Peter Witkin is one of the most controversial artistsworking today, unsurprising for an artist whose career began photographingsideshow performers at Coney Island as a teenager and who cites hiswitnessing of the decapitation of a child in an accident as an influentialchildhood experience.Witkin's extraordinary visual sensibility producesshocking, yet undeniably compelling tableaux that enact macabre deviantdreams and that find beauty in the grotesque, the different, or theunusual.The thinking Goth's favorite artist', Part Hieronymus Bosch, partTexas Chainsaw Massacre' - many definitions have been offered forthe unique vision of Witkin, but his extraordinary body of work does notallow for any simplistic definition.His photography both explicitlyreferences and continues the tradition of the great artists of Western arthistory such as Bosch, Goya, and Velazquez, referring to the historical andmythological figures and symbols of these artists' paintings.Yet Witkinalso reinterprets the nineteenth-century fascination with the bearded lady,the Siamese twin, the giantess - the circus freak'.In an advertisementfor models, her reveals the extent of his subject matter: Pinheads,dwarfs, giants, hunchbacks, pre-op transsexuals, bearded women, people withtails, wings, reversed hands or feet - hermaphrodites and teratoids (aliveor dead), anyone bearing the wounds of Christ.'He exalts his subjects bysetting them in a fine art context, and offers up still-lifes oftenfeaturing dismembered bodies or delicately posed cadavers to create imagesrich with meaning that force us to examine the human condition.This book is the best introduction to Witkin's work, featuring 55 imagesthat offer the full range of Witkin's subject matter and visual expression. The essay by Eugenia Parry explains Witkin's contribution to art historyand reveals the influences on his work.Each photograph is accompanied bya commentary, written by the author, that enables the reader to understandthe background of each image and reveals extra information about theindividual subjects, making it of interest to readers both new to andalready acquainted with Witkin's body of work.