Joel-Peter Witkin

Gods of Heaven and Earth. Twelvetrees, 1989. ISBN 9780942642391. Joel-Peter Witkin, Twelve Photographs in Gravure (1994) Harms Way: Lust and Madness, Murder and Mayhem. Twin Palms, 1994. ISBN 9780944092286. Joel-Peter Witkin: a Retrospective. Scalo: 1995. ISBN 978-1881616207.

Witkin claims that his artistic vision springs from an episode he witnessed as a young child, an automobile accident in front of his house in which a little 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 He says his family's difficulties also influenced his work. His favorite artist is Giotto. His photographic techniques draw on early Daguerreotypes and on the work of E. J. Bellocq. Those of Witkin's works which use corpses have had to be created in Mexico to get around restrictive US laws. Because of the transgressive nature of the contents of his images, his works have been labelled exploitative and have sometimes shocked public opinion. His techniques include scratching the negative, bleaching or toning the print, and using a 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 photograph Sanitarium inspired the final presentation of Alexander McQueen's Spring/Summer 2001 collection based on avian imagery, the walls of another box within the faux psychiatric ward collapsed to reveal a startling tableau vivant: a reclining, masked nude breathing through a tube and surrounded by fluttering moths.

Witkin's work is held in the following permanent collections: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL: 7 prints (as of 28 March 2023) High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA: 1 print (as of 28 March 2023) J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA: 7 prints (as of 28 March 2023) Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA: 6 prints (as of 28 March 2023) Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain: 3 prints (as of 28 March 2023) Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA: 7 prints (as of 28 March 2023) Princeton Art Museum, Princeton, NJ: 24 works (as of 28 March 2023) San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA: 4 prints (as of 28 March 2023) Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.: 2 prints (as of 28 March 2023) Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Holland Whitney Museum, New York: 1 print (as of 26 March 2023)