Joel-Peter Witkin Vanitas

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to photographs, it includes many lesser-known drawings and paintings, as well as Witkin's most recent, previously unpublished photographs.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.