(Portrait of Nan, New Mexico, 1984)
How to now make sense of that master of the dark tableau, Joel-Peter Witkin? Unlike some photographers whom I seem to have an ongoing fascination with (Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Nan Goldin to name a few), Witkin came along in the ‘80s, and I’ve hardly paid attention to him since. His images, though, continue to startle and provoke—as does the rigor with which he makes them.
With his relentless focus on freaks, deformity, and the ravages of the flesh, Witkin’s obsessions back then overlapped a bit with ‘80s David Lynch. In fact, you could easily plop the Eraserhead baby into a Witkin still-life.
My entirely spontaneous—and possibly reductive—theory as to why Witkin peaked in ‘80s? AIDS was peaking, too. The horror of what the body was capable of was, sadly, all too apparent everywhere. Witkin perhaps was simply channeling that dread.
The photographer’s own version of what sparked his obsessions is as fitting as it is notorious:
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.
To hear, and see, more of what makes photographer Joel-Peter Witkin tick (including an account of his initiation into sex with a pre-op transexual), check out the following segment from Vile Bodies, a ‘98 Channel 4 documentary made on the body and the “crisis of looking.” A link to Part II of Witkin’s segment follows at the bottom.