Joel-Peter Witkin

One of the most well known and controversial photographic artists working today, Joel-Peter Witkin (b. 1939) makes photographs that shock, yet also provoke and question. His remarkable tableaux and delicately posed still-lifes find beauty in the deformed, the scarred, the unusual, and even in the dead. Witkin follows in the tradition of Bosch, Goya and Velazquez, borrowing from the historical and mythological figures and symbols of Western art history, and reinterpreting the nineteenth century practice of photographing the 'other'. He has won four National Endowment Grants and his work has been included in the permanent collections of the MoMA and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. He has also been the subject of exhibitions worldwide, including a major retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York in 1995. Disturbing and compelling, his images force us to confront our human condition.