Do you like it weird? I like it weird. Witkin always delivers.

Witkin, Joel-Peter: A Retrospective – Joel-Peter Witkin (1995)

            I own two copies of the first Witkin book I ever saw, Gods of Earth & Heaven.  One copy is a first edition with some slight water damage, and the other is a second edition, signed by the artist.  Awesome.  They scare the shit out of people.  This book collects over 100 images from a twenty year period.  It is a catalog from a retrospective of Witkin’s work held at the Guggenheim Museum.  Oh shit what I would give to travel back in time and see that show!  Amazing.

            I love Witkin’s work.  It is truly profound, while being complete artifice.  It is total ART.  It is not for everyone.  My wife will not really look at it, and I keep the books away from my mom.  In every aspect, Witkin’s work lies at the extreme of what photograph can convey.  As Mr. Witkin has said himself, “when people see my work, there is no ‘grey area’ of response.  What they experience is either love or hate.”

There is such a fine line between Love and Hate.

 

            I think most artists would kill for strong reactions such as these.  I would love to take his books back in time to the Victorian Era, or some other highly refined bullshit era, and see what they would think. My guess is that, in times when culture is highly refined, regimented, and ornate, those very same people secretly long for the ugly, the profane, the disfigured and the grotesque.

            When the world seems too sanitized, when art and music and entertainment is so dumbed-down, so focused on the lowest-common-denominator, it is art that pushes everyone’s boundaries that becomes much more important.

(To see some of Joel-Peter Witkin's current work at Edelman Gallery, click here:  http://www.edelmangallery.com/witkin.htm )

Sometimes photographs are not pleasant.

Harms Way: Lust & Madness, Murder & Mayhem.  A Book of Photographs – Joel-Peter Witkin (editor) (1994)

            Photographer Joel-Peter Witkin first came into my consciousness around 1992-1993, when a dorm-mate of mine, one legendary Barnaby Struve, shared a bizarre book of photographs by Witkin titled Gods of Earth & Heaven.  Inside were maniacally prepared photographs of deformed people, dead bodies, freaks, and all manner of grotesquery that just blew my fucking mind.  I never knew people did such bizarre art!  It was one of those experiences where you think, “The world is a far, far stranger place than I ever knew…”  He truly is a twisted, beautiful master of the bizarre.

            This book, however, is a collection of photos edited by Mr. Witkin, divided into four parts.  The first consists of turn-of-the-century crime scene photos (meaning turn of the 19^th into the 20^th century), and then 19^th century photos of mental asylum inmates, complete with annotated diagnoses from the doctors.  The other parts are collected medical photos from the 19^th century, care of the Burns Archive, and finally images from the Kinsey Institute of sex research.  Each is presented with very little commentary by Witkin.

            It is a very strange book, and makes for difficult reading sometimes, as one is confronted not only with the violence we do to each other, but also with the ways we choose to see ourselves, hiding our kinks, putting our mentally ill in asylums barely better than gulags.  Witkin has always been into the dark side of human nature.  These images are not beautiful in the normal sense of that word, but they are REAL, and that counts for more.  It is a book that I own and will keep as a reference for my entire life.

If my brain doesn't melt first.

            
            It is easy to forget that photography has been around for over 160 years now, and that so many images taken for purely informational purposes are hidden away in vaults, or slowly crumbling in an attic somewhere.  It takes someone like Witkin to rescue these images from the neglect and share them with the modern world.

(To order this book from Twelvetrees Press, click here:  http://www.twinpalms.com/?p=out_of_print&bookID=138 )