Photography is a part of daily life in our digital age, with selfie culture, food porn, and pictures of cats visually permeating social media and the news. With contemporary image making, we are also less likely to be gullible about all of what we see. Nearly every image we see in the press is edited to some degree, be it automatic softening on our forward-facing camera phones, Instagram filters, or full-blown Photoshop reconstruction to easily fake a tabloid tableau of cheating celebs, alien babies, or Jesus eating a cheeseburger.
These make the photographic tableaux of Joel-Peter Witkin even more fascinating, as he uses traditional photographic methods and antiquated cameras to photograph his real-life (or death) subjects. His images are dense with literary, religious, and art historical references that pose moral challenges to the viewer. His images are inhabited by social pariahs including dwarves, hermaphrodites, people with unusual physical capabilities or deformities, and mutilated corpses or amputated body parts from the dead.
Witkin’s most notorious photographs portraying corpses and body parts were produced mostly in Mexico — where he could get away with such a thing legally — and where he’d worked out a deal with a hospital in Mexico City that let him sort through unclaimed, anonymous corpses and body parts picked up on the streets to use in his artworks. The resulting photographs are simultaneously hauntingly beautiful and grotesque.
Witkin claims he obtained his macabre sensibilities from an episode he witnessed as a young child – an automobile accident in front of his house, where a young girl was decapitated.
It happened on a Sunday when my mother was escorting my twin brother and me down the steps of the tenement where we lived. We were going to church. While walking down the hallway to the entrance of the building, we heard an incredible crash mixed with screaming and cries for help. The accident involved three cars, all with families in them. Somehow, in the confusion, I was no longer holding my mother’s hand. At the place where I stood at the curb, I could see something rolling from one of the overturned cars. It stopped at the curb where I stood. It was the head of a little girl. I bent down to touch the face, to speak to it—but before I could touch it someone carried me away.
Witkin carefully plans his montages, sketching their designs and arranging every detail before beginning work in the studio. Once models are obtained and in the studio, it can take up to two weeks to finish one photograph. He then reinvents the image in his darkroom, where he makes the photograph into something virtually handmade by scratching and even puncturing the negative. Printing is the final step in making the taboo and the grotesque seem beautiful, even sexually desirable in Witkin’s world.
I wanted my photographs to be as powerful as the last thing a person sees or remembers before death.
Considering that there were over 150 different methods of producing images within the first 200 years of photography’s inception, the preciousness and skill of this medium is a dying art form. Between hiring his models, procuring body parts, and the development and hand editing required to develop and expose his film in a darkroom, Joel-Peter Witkin only produces 10-12 photographs every year.
