Joel-Peter Witkin (born September 13, 1939, in Brooklyn, New York City) is an American photographer.
He was born to Jewish father and a Roman Catholic mother. His parents divorced when Witkin was young because they were unable to transcend their religious differences. He attended grammar school at Saint Cecelia's in Brooklyn and went on to Grover Cleveland High School . He worked as war photographer between 1961 and 1964 during the Vietnam war. In 1967 he decide to work as a freelance photographer and became City Walls Inc. official photographer. Later, he attended to Cooper School of Fine Arts in Brooklyn where he studied sculpture and became Bachelor of Arts in 1974. After the Columbia University granted him a scholarship he ended his studies at the New Mexico University in Albuquerque where he became Master of Fine Arts.
Witkin claims that his vision and sensibility was initiated by an episode he witnessed when he was just a small child, a car accident that occurred in front of his house in which a little girl was decapitated. He also claims that the difficulties in his family were an influence for his work too. His favourite artist, and a major influence in his work, is Giotto.
His work often deals with such themes as death, corpses (or pieces of them) and various outsiders such as dwarves, transsexuals, hermaphrodites and physically deformed people. His complex tableauxs often recall religious episodes or famous classical paintings. Because of the transgressive nature of the contents of his pictures, his works have been labeled exploitive and have sometimes shocked public opinion. His art was often marginalized because of this challenging aspect.
He employs a highly intuitive approach to the physical process of making the photograph, including scratching the negative, bleaching or toning the print, and an actual hands-in-the-chemicals printing technique. This experimentation began after seeing a 19th-century ambrotype of a woman and her ex-lover who had been scratched from the frame.
External links
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warning: the following websites contain photographs of an extremely graphic nature.)
Last updated: 10-22-2005 02:36:36
