Germano Celant

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Joel-Peter Witkin

Italy) Castello Di Rivoli (Museum : Rivoli

Few living photographers are as consistently controversial and provocative as Joel-Peter Witkin, whose work elicits hostility and admiration in equal measure. Shocking and compelling, the photographs in this retrospective collection reach to the outer limits of human nature. 100 full-page reproductions, printed in four colors.

Witkin

A Book of Photographs

Harms Way: Lust & Madness, Murder & Mayhem 

Eugenia Parry

Featuring more than sixty reproductions and a critical introduction, a survey of the unconventional photographer's work and legacy considers the influences of movements and fellow artists on his achievements while evaluating his depictions of such edgy subjects as corpses, hermaphrodites, and mutilation.

This is a retrospective look at the work of one of the late twentieth century's most profound and disturbing artists. For this collection Joel-Peter Witkin has personally selected from his own archives his finest images, ranging from his early Coney Island "freak show" studies to his most recent work. Witkin's portraits of subjects both living and dead have disturbed countless viewers for their unwavering viewpoint and magically grotesque compositions. The artist's sojourn captured here, with each photograph a station along his path, veers between oblivion and salvation. This book depicts Witkin's journey until now. Texts by the artist and Eugenia Parry.

The Bone House

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Forty Photographs

In this, our second volume of Witkin's photographs, the work is as controversial as ever. In often torturous or eroticized still lifes and tableaux, cadavers, physical anomalies, transsexuals and animals are carefully arranged to create a mythology that could originate only in the imagination of this singular artist. In Gods of Earth and Heaven, Witkin advances an aesthetic point of view in a manner that raises his artistic output to a new level of sophistication. As often praised as he is derided by critics, his work has become a basis for serious debate on issues of life and death, love and sexuality. At the very least Witkin's work challenges traditional canons of beauty and the spiritual in art. An updated bibliography and exhibition history are included.

Gods of Earth and Heaven

Inevitable death and our agony to attain Utopia have made existence a form of pathology. We are left with the secret need for redemption which few of us will understand or witness. This need still lives in acts of love, courage and art. In the images included in this book it is found in the conjoined destinies of artist and subject, phantoms on either side of that curtain we call photography. Implicit in these photographs is the brutal extreme of their purpose and an intimation however distant to their makers that something was manifested beyond the event itself.

Lust & Madness, Murder & Mayhem : a Book of Photographs

Harms Way

Otto M. Urban

Vanitas offers a concise survey of one of the most controversial photographers alive. Since the late 1970s, Witkin's black-and-white portraits and still-lifes of hermaphrodites, body parts, severed heads, mutilations and similar themes have inevitably provided shock fodder to the religious right, while seeming to evoke an easy relationship to ideas of decadence and morbidity... Vanitas provides a cross-section of the artist's work from the 1970s to the present. In addition to photographs, it includes many lesser-known drawings and paintings, as well as Witkin's most recent, previously unpublished photographs. A bilingual (English/Czech) text by the art historian Otto M. Urban summarizes the development of Witkin's life and work.

Joel-Peter Witkin

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