[chris]

Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1939, Joel-Peter Witkin is an American fine-art photographer who lives and works in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Since the 1980s, he has constructed complex arrangements from severed heads, other body parts and unclaimed cadavers, with many of the compositions made inside a Mexico City morgue. Witkin subsequently scratched the negatives and treated them with chemical toning, giving the finished prints the character of deteriorated plates from an earlier era. His 1990 still life Feast of Fools matches one of the works. Collections at institutions such as the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art hold his art. None of the unclaimed deceased individuals represented in the work has ever been identified. Critics have characterized his treatment of the anonymous dead as exploitative, while major museums display and collect the work as fine art.

[wolfie]

I don't understand Chris. What do you mean?

[Jere]

i think your right chris

you'd have to be fucking nuts to do something like that

[Sharon]

Fucking nuts yet fucking amazing

[collaredgirl65]

Joel-Peter Witkin did some of these.

Joel-Peter Witkin is a photographer whose images of the human condition are undeniably powerful. For more than twenty years he has pursued his interest in spirituality and how it impacts the physical world in which we exist. Finding beauty within the grotesque, Witkin pursues this complex issue through people most often cast aside by society — human spectacles including hermaphrodites, dwarfs, amputees, androgynes, carcases, people with odd physical capabilities, fetishists and “any living myth . . . anyone bearing the wounds of Christ.” His fascination with other people’s physicality has inspired works that confront our sense of normalcy and decency, while constantly examining the teachings handed down through Christianity. His constant reference to paintings from art history, including the works of Bosch, Goya, Velasquez, Miro, Botticelli and Picasso are testaments to his need to create a new history for himself. By using imagery and symbols from the past, Witkin celebrates our history while constantly redefining its present day context.

Visiting medical schools, morgues and insane asylums around the world, Witkin seeks out his collaborators, who, in the end, represent the numerous personas of the artist himself. The resulting photographs are haunting and beautiful, grotesque yet bold in their defiance a hideous beauty that is as compelling as it is taboo. Witkin begins each image by sketching his ideas on paper, perfecting every detail by arranging the scene before he gets into the studio to stage his elaborate tableaus. Once photographed, Witkin spends hours in the darkroom, scratching and piercing his negatives, transforming them into images that look made rather than taken. Through printing, Witkin reinterprets his original idea in a final act of adoration. Joel-Peter Witkin lets us look into his created world, which is both frightening and fascinating, as he seeks to dismantle our preconceived notions about sexuality and physical beauty. Through his imagery, we gain a greater understanding about human difference and tolerance.

Joel-Peter Witkin has been called ‘part Hieronymous Bosch, part Chainsaw Massacre.’
His photographic tableaux, carefully arranged and painstakingly printed, offer us the chance to transcend subject matter, and enter what Witkin calls a world of ‘love and redemption’.”

Somewhere between depraved and divine, Joel-Peter Witkin has created a space that’s occupied by no other living photographer. His latest book, The Bone House, documents his progression from child photographer to where he stands alone today. Heady words, true, but deserved. Joel-Peter Witkin is a fearless image-maker.

The book itself is a beautiful piece of work. Green cloth in a gray slipcase, it’s the perfect vehicle to carry his disturbing, yet compelling images. Witkin is nothing if not a study in contrasts.

What distinguishes Joel-Peter Witkin from his contemporaries is a restlessness and desire that leads him to places others fear –the dark side where every glimmer of light is authentic. His milieu is nothing short of the greatest mystery that’s occupied humanity since its very beginnings, the ultimate question of life and death –questions that by their very nature are ultimately unanswerable, except in those personal, brief, and experiential moments when art bridges the gap between the senses and the intellect. No one occupies this ground better than Witkin.

Witkin makes art that can’t be dismissed or ignored. In fact, it achieves the status all art yearns for: no one, on seeing a Witkin image, can remain ambivalent. But this isn’t only a product of what Witkin chooses to photograph. No, it’s in how he takes this material and transcends its limitations. Using cadavers, hermaphrodites, hunchbacks, and others commonly known as freaks in general society, Witkin creates visual paradoxes that challenge our perception. Often criticized for sensationalism and the exploitation of his subjects, he actually lifts and redeems them –makes them central to his spiritual quest. Once photographed, they enter the eternal stream of art.

It’s impossible to conceptualize a Witkin image in a single glance and then dismiss it. Each image, after careful darkroom manipulation with razor blades, pins, and other implements, forces us to question our ability, viscerally, to understand. A Witkin image can, like the best poetry, be read again and again and always remain a mystery –one that feels just outside our grasp. A line from Elizabeth Bishop comes to mind, “and [we] looked and looked our infant sight away.”

[collaredgirl65]

And a link to more info about him. http://www.dogmaticblog.com/2009/08/...eter-witkin-2/

[scab]

its fucking sick,love it

[imbok]

It all seems perfectly normal to me.

[cutty_McGee]

Witkin lives in my hometown I've tried to get in contact with him but no reply

[fritter]

Thats just disgusting