Joel-Peter Witkin

The limbless, the mutilated, the crippled, the transgendered, the obese—all those who have traditionally been assigned to the “sideshow freak” category by history’s darkest and most misguided forces—serve as models of great and sublime beauty in the black-and-white photographic oeuvre of Joel-Peter Witkin.

Once the more prudish—er, sensitive—viewer gets past whatever initial shock the photographs may provoke, a multilayered world awaits discovery. There is the quintessential Catholic torment of Poussin in Hell, 1999, and Satiro, Mexico, 1992, the former a massive, busy staged allegory of the spiritual aspects of the artistic process, while the latter depicts an armless man, his stubs crowned with barbed wire, his head adorned with devil horns, hooves replacing his legs. There is the blunt sexuality of Carrot Cake #1 NM, 1980, portraying a morbidly obese woman inserting a large phallic carrot into her vagina. There is the supernal mystery of Las Meninas, NM, 1987, a chaotic studio scene in which childhood, voyeurism, and pain are mixed like the colors on the palette held by the artist figure on the left side of the image, his face distorted and scrawled out in a gesture of self-erasure.

To coin a somewhat clunky phrase, Witkin puts the reality back into corporeality. For it is not the bodies––living and dead––that appear disfigured in Witkin’s photos. The implicit cosmological message here is that no body is as ugly as the world we live in. Likewise, it is the world that Witkin depicts that has become mutilated through the staging and composition of the works, whose appearance is both grotesque and timeless.