Joel-Peter Witkin (Brooklyn, 1939. Lives and works in Albuquerque, New Mexico) is one of the greatest exponents of contemporary photography: solitary, exaggerated, macabre, disturbing, rhetorical, visionary, cynical, redundant, grotesque, extremely refined: these are some of the contradictory adjectives that crowd the mind in front of his excessive photographic prints. Throughout his career, which began as a military photographer tasked with documenting the daily life of troops based in Europe (focusing on accidents and suicides), death is an essential element of his poetic universe, expressed with an overabundant aesthetic, but in its own way of impeccable elegance. Witkin has argued in interviews that this founding inspiration has its roots in an episode he witnessed as a child: a tragic car accident in front of his house in which a little girl was decapitated and her head rolled onto the sidewalk where he was standing from one of the overturned cars.
Joel-Peter Witkin, “Au revoir”, installation view at CAR Gallery, Bologna, courtesy CAR gallery
This bloody and gloomy imagery in his poetics lives in symbiosis with the widespread instillation of a dizzying catalogue of images taken from the history of classical and modern art, hovering and ubiquitous in the general composition as in the apparently most ordinary detail. The artist’s favourite subjects belong to the academic genres of still life and vanitas: the absolute protagonist is the naked human body, a body at the antipodes of any ideal conformation that appears, often in fragments, as the object of still life compositions together with other key elements of the genre, such as tableware, clocks, skulls, fruit about to rot on tables set like the counters of an autopsy room, animals (also dismembered). His models, often freak show stars and people with severely handicapped or mutilated bodies, challenge the dominant stereotypes of the civilized body and exhibit unexpected carnal configurations: deformations, dismemberments, incisions, paralysis, withering and amputations, all the more deviant from the norm if we relate them to the puritanism with which American culture has always treated the body. Witkin is disturbing[1] for the brazenness of his autarchic research and because the impact of his images cannot help but call into question the theme of the presumed truthfulness of photography, its value as testimony and, in this case, as a relic.
Joel-Peter Witkin, “Au revoir”, installation view at CAR Gallery, Bologna, courtesy CAR gallery
Sometimes hostile reactions have greeted Witkin’s photographs of cadavers and human or animal remains (sometimes museum anatomical models, often shots taken by him in morgues), placing them in an elaborate setting. He is not the only contemporary photographer working in this field and all of them are part of a lasting artistic vein that derives from the danse macabre of the Middle Ages, from the memento mori and vanities of classical painting, from the disiecta membra of the condemned painted by Géricault, as Anne Biroleau writes in Joël-Peter Witkin. enfer ou ciel, heaven or hell (2012, Editions de la Martinière). Not to mention the popular photography from the 19th century of post-mortem portraits, animated by the intent to preserve the illusion that the person was still alive, which enjoyed extraordinary diffusion for over a century, arousing very little controversy, although it later disappeared from the public imagination. But Witkin’s work is also disorienting because it places itself in clear antithesis to the canons of the contemporary digital image, which is fluid, colored, dematerialized and replicating: the artist, in fact, conceives photography as an artifact, the result of a process of which the shot is only one of the phases. It is first and foremost staged photography, in which he, as a film director, stages each element in advance to have full control of the materialization of his idea. Witkin meticulously designs his sets based on careful pencil or charcoal drawings and handwritten notes for the placement of objects, the angle of lighting, the arrangement of models against neutral walls or drapes, their posture, size, volume and costumes.
The shooting takes place in less than half a day, including the preparation of the sets and models, also because the photographer (who generally favors the analog medium) uses only one film roll. The construction of his images then requires him to personally take care of the creation of the black and white print in the darkroom, preparing the chemical baths and then intervening on the already exposed photographic paper by scraping, tearing, scribbling, engraving, adding paint, retouching, cuttings, collages or layers of encaustic, in an attempt to overwrite the raw image with the traces of the imaginative thought that gave rise to it. The artist seems to oppose the multiple nature of photography: he produces few copies (usually runs of ten) and often unique pieces, given the additional character of unrepeatability conferred on the series by the variety of the manipulations subsequent to the print, to the point that, given that for some years he has dedicated himself only to drawing, of some of the most iconic shots only the artist’s proofs remain in circulation. What is acrobatically plural, as we mentioned at the beginning, is the artistic imagery that his shots manage to mix, combining allusions to the Italian, French, German and Flemish Renaissance, to classical Greek and Roman statues, but also to great American photography, from Walker Evans to Diane Arbus, and European, like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Mario Giacomelli. Witkin does not create without pre-existing material and relates his work to the art from the past with an approach that could be defined as taxonomic.
Joel-Peter Witkin, “Au revoir”, installation view at CAR Gallery, Bologna, courtesy CAR gallery
Actually, in his compositions he develops a dense network of extraneous images, which are active as enigmatic rhetorical figures of a speech astonishing for its syntactic virtuosity. Quotation is a common practice in the art history, but here it is not a matter of establishing an intertextual relationship, but of the coagulation in an original work of an image produced starting from quotations, collages and allusions that within it take on the value of lexemes. And these minimal linguistic units are orchestrated in function of an abnormal photographic corpus, which invites us to detach aesthetic satisfaction from the referent so that the gaze can get lost in the baroque profusion of the image. Even if we are inevitably challenged to recognize structures, compositional arrangements, details and iconographies of artists such as Goltzius, Ribera, Rembrandt, Goya, Courbet, Ensor, Picasso, Beckmann (just a few names from an endless pantheon, to give an idea of what attracts him), everything is overshadowed by an ambiguous pleasure in anatomical excess and by the density of an investigation that restores in our refractory times a continuity with death and the dark side of life, a connection long removed from the Western collective imagination.
Joel-Peter Witkin, “Au revoir”, installation view at CAR Gallery, Bologna, courtesy CAR gallery
The Au revoir exhibition currently underway in Bologna at CAR Gallery is a precious opportunity to get closer to the work of a master who must be admired “live”. It brings together a selection of analog (mostly) and small-format digital prints, made between 1998 and 2017. The exhibition project, developed in collaboration with the artist’s studio and Baudoin Lebon, his long-time gallery owner, is also the debut in the world of photography of the gallery, which has recently been shifting the focus of its research from the previously exclusive sphere of emerging artists towards a broader and more structured look at contemporary artistic production, also including mid-career artists who are already internationally known and, now, cult names such as Joel-Peter Witkin. Compared to the very crude works that in the 80s and 90s consecrated the photographer’s damnation, the works in the exhibition constitute a softer, almost romantic, declination of his poetics, whose dark veins, in these essays, are determined not so much by the insistence on physical injuries or deformities of bodies (which he always assiduously frequented), but by the ambiguity of meditative atmospheres capable of arousing the anxiety that one feels on the threshold of a mystery.
Joel-Peter Witkin, “Witkin Night in a Small Town”, New Mexico, 2007, silver print, 50 x 40 cm, courtesy CAR gallery
Among the most notable pieces, we point out Imperfect Thirst (2016), an exhausted profile of a woman of Pre-Raphaelite elegance posing behind a sacred conversation parapet with a barracuda on her head, or Night in a Small Town (2007), a surreal duet inside a Hopperian room of a pianist and a singer-centaur, or Life is an Invention: The Constellation of Balthus (2008), a dreamlike tableau vivant crowded with presences and quotations orchestrated as in an avant-garde ballet. The exhibition ideally concludes with Au revoir (2007), a pencil drawing of Picasso-like influence placed next to Oedipus and Giocasta (2007), a very illuminating comparison to investigate the artist’s modus operandi.
[1] In the technical sheet of the exhibition “Joel-Peter Witkin The Master of his Masters” held in 2013 at the PAN – Palazzo delle Arti in Naples, for example, the following warning appeared: “The Alinari Foundation wishes to inform the public that the photographs on display may be shocking, therefore viewing the exhibition is not recommended for sensitive people and minors”.
Info:
Joel-Peter Witkin. Au revoir
8/03/2025 – 19/04/2025
CAR Gallery
via Azzo Gardino, 14/a – Bologna
www.cardrde.com
Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
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