About Me
This page is the official Joel-Peter Witkin MySpace page. It is designed and operated by his son, Kersen Witkin. I hope you enjoy the page. If you have any recommendations to make the page better, please to feel free to send me comments. Enjoy!!!PLEASE DO NOT ASK ME TO FORWARD ESSAYS THAT YOU ARE IN THE PROCESS OF WRITING ABOUT HIM...I WILL NOT PASS THEM ALONG!!!
Joel-Peter Witkin (born September 13, 1939, in Brooklyn, New York City) is an American photographer.
He was born to a Jewish father and a Roman Catholic mother. He was born a triplet (two boys and one girl). The girl died at birth. The two boys survived. He also has an older sister, Sara. His identical twin brother, Jerome Witkin, who also plays a significant role in the art world for his realistic paintings. Jerome won the pulitzer for painting when he was just 21 years old. His parents divorced when Witkin was young because they were unable to transcend their religious differences. He attended grammar school at Saint Cecelia's in Brooklyn and went on to Grover Cleveland High School. He worked as war photographer between 1961 and 1964 during the Vietnam war. In 1967 he decided to work as a freelance photographer and became City Walls Inc. official photographer. Later, he attended Cooper Union in New York where he studied sculpture and became Bachelor of Arts in 1974. After the Columbia University granted him a scholarship he ended his studies at the New Mexico University in Albuquerque, where he became Master of Fine Arts. He struggled to be famous. After he received his master's degree, he worked as a waiter at an Italian resturant in New Mexico.
In New Mexico, he met and married Cynthia Bency Witkin. They had one child, Kersen, in 1978.
His current wife's name is Barbara.
Witkin claims that his vision and sensibility were initiated by an episode he witnessed when he was just a small child, a car accident that occurred in front of his house in which a little girl was decapitated. He also claims that the difficulties in his family were an influence for his work too. His favourite artist is Giotto, but the most obvious artistic influences on his work are Surrealism, particularly Max Ernst, and Baroque art. His photographic techniques draw on early Daguerreotypes and on the work of E. J. Bellocq.
His work often deals with such themes as death, corpses (or pieces of them) and various outsiders such as dwarves, transsexuals, hermaphrodites and physically deformed people. His complex tableaux often recall religious episodes or famous classical paintings. Because of the transgressive nature of the contents of his pictures, his works have been labeled exploitative and have sometimes shocked public opinion. His art was often marginalized because of this challenging aspect.
He employs a highly intuitive approach to the physical process of making the photograph, including scratching the negative, bleaching or toning the print, and an actual hands-in-the-chemicals printing technique. This experimentation began after seeing a 19th-century ambrotype of a woman and her ex-lover who had been scratched from the frame.
Joel-Peter Witkin's newest photographs:
"The Raft of George Bush"
"The Raft of George Bush" is a contemporary "Ship of Fools" which has as its pictorial basis, the "Medusa" of Gericault. Bush sits lost in his grand ideas, shown as small electric lights. His left hand rests on the large, perfect breast of "Condi" Rice. This, the most powerful woman on earth, is merely a mouth-piece, a token blackie who dresses in haute coutre. Above Bush is his mother, Barbara, basking in the light, the myth of Republicanism. At her feet is Defense Secretary Rumsfeld crushed by the defeat of Iraq. Colin Powell wears the wreath of militarism and the dollar sign vision he now lives for, after lying to the world at the United Nations. Powell taps Bush on the shoulder to make him aware of their rescue. Vice President Cheney and his wife express joyful rapture in their deliverance. Dick Cheney, a "whatever it takes to succeed" type, is dressed in a gown and bra, reminiscent of the cowardly men on the sinking Titanic who dressed as women in order to save themselves. Below the mast is a religious figure representing Theocracy and Priest-pederasts. Has the young man below him received spiritual comfort or oral sex. The angry angel, wearing a bra of tea cups, holds a large bone signifying cannibalistic capitalism, that charnel house of our dismal social progress. All the other models in this tableaux are posed as characters in the Gercault painting with the exception of the black African named Cyril, who waves to the ship. All the other men are M.T.V. and Big Mac prodigals with the soft bodies and minds of corporate culture.
JP Witkin
