Bizarre Photos of Joel-Peter Witkin

Joel-Peter Witkin, "Harms Way...lust & madness, murder & mayhem"

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Twin Palms Publisher, 2nd edition, limited to 5000 copies, copyright
1994 
9.25" x 12.25" 
printed in Hong Kong 
Book in excellent condition, dustjacket has some scuffs and scratches
(seems to have been designed with such scratches?) 
Harms Way: Lust & Madness, Murder & Mayhem : A Book of Photographs
(Hardcover) by Joel-Peter Witkin (Editor) 
Hardcover Publisher: Twin Palms Pub; 2nd edition (August 1, 1994)
Language: English ISBN: 0944092284 Product Dimensions: 1.0 x 9.5 x
12.8 inches Shipping Weight: 2.7 pounds 
Quarto, (12" X 9"), black cloth covered boards with blindstamped
title. 132 pp. plus colophon. Illustrated throughout with 104
four-color plates. 
Joel Peter Witkin is long established as a master of the visually
bizarre, creating studio photographs that push the envelope of
believability to the precipice and then encourage the viewer to
accompany the descent. They are manufactured by the artist. But here
Witkin has gathered bits of real life that far exceed the contrivances
of his own photography. Distorted and leaning toward nauseating as
some of these real life photographs from history may be, they are all
the more strange because they are Documentation instead of Creation.
And who better to compile this odyssey into the dark realm but the man
who spends his creative energies devising fabricated scenarios that
parallel these photographs? A fascinating survey of just how
untameable is this planet we call home........ 
...courtesy: Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA) 
Harms Way brings together four unusual collections. Edited and with an
introduction by Joel-Peter Witkin, the book includes
turn-of-the-century crime-scene photographs, nineteenth-century asylum
inmate portraits with calligraphic annotations detailing the patients'
diagnoses, nineteenth-century medical photographs from the Burns
Archive, and a selection of images from the Kinsey Institute for Sex
Research. The ability of the photograph to show us our powerlessness
in the face of madness, lust, disease, and death, survives in these
brittle and arresting images. Selected by Andy Grundberg in the New
York Times Book Review as one of the ten best photography books of
1994. 
Joel-Peter Witkin Supervert's review of an exhibit featuring the
morbid works of photographer Joel-Peter Witkin. Originally published
in Artforum Magazine (Summer 1993). Exhibit at the Pace/MacGill
Gallery, New York When Joel-Peter Witkin takes a photograph of a
headless corpse (its neck terminating in a meaty stump, its penis
shriveling into its fat stomach, its feet absurdly sporting black
socks), does it repel you? Is death repulsive? We know that people who
develop a familiarity with death (undertakers, soldiers, etc.) can eat
in the same room as a corpse and digest as happily as ever. It is
illogical to say that death is intrinsically able to repel; rather, we
come to repel it, to hide it away in hospitals, to say No to death (in
the 1950s,the English sociologist Geoffrey Gorer claimed that death
had become the new pornography, replacing sex as society's greatest
taboo). So is it possible for Witkin's photograph, Man Without a Head,
1993, to repel you? Or does it simply put you in the uncomfortable
position of having to say a Yes or a No? Witkin has long specialized
in subjects to which society tends to say a resounding No: not just
corpses, but sexual pariahs, circus freaks, and "physical prodigies of
all kinds," as he once put it. The generally necrotic b/w photographs
in this new show employ the same elements that Witkin has combined and
recombined for years: abundant art historical references, manipulated
negatives and prints, Baroque staging and lighting, etc. But what is
the function of these elements? Is it possible to reconcile the formal
sophistication - and beauty - of Witkin's photography with its
"repulsive" subjects? In Still Life, Mexico, 1992, a crisp white
tablecloth emerges from a black background to proffer fruit, a fish, a
roll, and a human leg (severed just below the knee). Though horrible,
stringy, meaty stuff gushes out the top of the leg, and a cut on its
side reveals globules of what looks like caviar, it's a perfectly
elegant still life - very deliberate, technically perfect, and utterly
unsensationalistic. Even if you want to say No to the subject matter,
its rendering is so beautiful that you just might say Yes. Why would
you want to say Yes to death, dismemberment, or any of the other
staples in Witkin's banquet of the bizarre? It's sort of like an
extreme form of multiculturalism, a respect for that which is
drastically foreign to you, even terrifying. In John Herring, Person
with AIDS, Posed as Flora with Lover and Mother, 1992, modeled after
Rembrandt's portrait of his wife Saskia as Flora, the subject stands
on a fake little cloud, a nipple poking out of his elaborate bodice,
his lover and mother sitting off to his left. No doubt this photograph
is a radical departure from the representational modes at either end
of the debate about how PWA's should be depicted (i.e. in works that
chronicle the debilitating effects of AIDS, a la Nicholas Nixon, or in
works that depict PWA's as living active, "normal" lives). Aren't both
these modes problematic, though, in that the former reduces the person
to the disease, while the latter denies the disease altogether?
Whereas one mode says No to the person, the other to the illness,
Witkin positions himself as the husband (Rembrandt: Saskia = Witkin:
Herring), as he who loves and cherishes regardless of sickness or
health. He often claims (as in a recent Vanity Fair article) to see
himself as "loving the unloved, the damaged, the outcasts," and such
unconditional acceptance characterizes his work in general: like St
Francis of Assisi, who drank the pus of lepers in order to overcome
his repulsion of them, Witkin is not a rubbernecker, an exploiter, or
a pessimist, but one who says Yes to everything questionable, even to
the terrible.