Note: I know we’re all adults here, but if you aren’t familiar with Joel-Peter Witkin’s work or are otherwise squeamish, clicking on some of these hyperlinks may ruin your day.
The photography of Joel-Peter Witkin can best be described in paradoxical terms of limited excess. In terms of content he’s never been reticent to go beyond the bounds of acceptable taste. He puts the disabled on equal footing with the dead, the pious with the perverse, and man with animal. At the same time, he does so in a style that is as unmistakably his own as it is widely imitable. His tableaux are a meshing of different periods of art history, baroque clashes with surrealism, and gothic reportage cohabitates with ornate fantasy. Even a simple photo of a severed head on a platter takes painstaking preparation: sketches, prop procurement, participant consent (where living), elaborate posing, water- and chemical-based distortion effects in development. It is all done for impact rather than narrative, for shock rather than immersion. Imagine reading just the last page of “The Lottery” or “The Tell-Tale Heart,” or the final moments of Psycho or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Photographers we consider great—Diane Arbus, Peter Hujar, Sally Mann—can make a story out of a moment. A Witkin photo, like a head without a body, is an ending without a story. Yet Witkin’s limitations have so wide a reach you’ve likely seen them without knowing it.
It was hardly dependent upon hype. Critical consensus on Witkin, where it exists at all, is often rooted in unfavorable contrast. Gary Indiana, in a 1985 Village Voice column on Mapplethorpe, musters a dismissive dig at his “tacky shock tactics” against the Lower East Side’s master of transgression. In the same vein, Dave Hickey, also writing on Mapplethorpe, condemns Witkin’s work as “the language of symptoms, of flagrant corruption, that is profoundly tolerable of the status quo.” Again in the Voice, 10 years after Indiana, Peter Schjeldahl, assessed Witkin’s art with more exacting scrutiny. It is “coy pastiche” hobbled all the more by “sheer, panting overkill … as if far-outness were quality-graded by the pound.” Witkin desires “both Christ-like compassion and Picasso-like valor” but is in truth “the heavy-metal guy of photography.” “With a bonus of piss-elegance,” Schjeldahl concludes, “Witkin’s work may have ultimate value as a training-wheels taste enjoyed by moderately troubled kids who will grow to like better things.” That, still, is somewhat better than David Hevey, a photographer who specializes in the disabled, boldly claiming in a 1990 British news segment on Witkin that “in 20 or 30 years time when disabled people are a powerful group, his work will be held up as a serious reactionary, retrogressive step.”
No such backlash ever came, in one part because of the foregoing. Unlike Mapplethorpe (more on this distinction later) he is neither a critical darling nor a bête noire. He is a kind of art world nuisance; a carnival barker at best and a grave robber at worst; P.T. Barnum spliced with Ed Gein and a Master of Fine Arts. He is the prize perhaps a few niche collectors and bottom-feeding reporters, but not of serious tastemakers. Outside of the art world is another matter, wherein production designers, music video directors, genre authors, and fashion designers have looked to his distinct aesthetic for inspiration with varying levels of explicitness. You see it directly in Jacob’s Ladder and in Rob Lowe/James Spader vehicle Bad Influence. You see it in Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer,” in David Bowie’s “Dead Man Walking.” You see it in Alexander McQueen’s Spring 2001 runway show. “Magnificently dark and depraved images,” says the creator of Pinhead in reverent approval.
Rather than crossover into mass culture, as Andres Serrano had, Witkin’s style haunts it in the same fashion as gothic fellow travelers H.R. Geiger, H.P. Lovecraft, Francis Bacon, the Brothers Quay, Edward Gorey, and lately Thomas Ligotti. This was not lost on Schjeldahl who, seeming more put off by Witkin’s admirers than his work, articulated an early portrait of the edgelord:
What would it take to be crazy about Witkin’s work? Probably an intensely anxious insecurity about one’s responses to art and, too, to life. Witkin’s appeal seems adolescent-male in a vein with Salvador Dali, M.C. Escher, and horror comics. The mechanism is that of fairy tales plus postpubertal sex and aggression. The newly and flimsily built adolescent personality reasonably dreads falling apart under pressures that include its own hormonal surges. Witkin-type art masters the dread through exaggerated visions of its realization. The target audience gets a thrilled sense of undergoing with aplomb the imaginable worst.
The edgelord delights in pure surface and gesture in a manner at once more exploitative than that of which Witkin is accused and no less prudish than the people the edgelord wants to provoke. In a healthier time, these impulses would be channeled into exorbitant interior decoration, such as described by Poe and Wilde, but it is now merely consumer grist. The combination of critical resignation and commercial appropriation gives the work an erroneous finality, assuming a vast distance between the work and the viewer and a monotony of style. It does not permit any degree of discernment from people who cannot help but be compelled by Witkin’s “heavy metal” vision. Without discernment there can be no intimacy—for Witkin begs a closer look.
Witkin’s overwhelming signature style at first lends little evidence of any thematic breakaway. But that breakaway is informed by two formative influences. Some of Witkin’s early photographs date back to the 1950s while visiting the Coney Island freak show as a teen. Witkin has cited its impact more than once, tinged by a distinct nostalgia. “When the freak show had to leave Coney Island because it wasn’t making any business,” Witkin recalls, “I wanted to leave with them. … But I left inwardly with them.” Witkin has photographed the deformed, hermaphrodites, conjoined twins, and stunt performers. The result is more theatrical than carnivalesque. He neither recreates the zoo-like enclosures of actual freak shows nor does he echo the backstage candor of Diane Arbus or Tod Browning. His subjects still perform, and that he does this at all is a matter of unending ethical debate, yet their performance is given over to a certain grandiosity that the carnival denies them. They are attractive and central rather than merely objective and peripheral. Through them, the viewer understands the difference between looking and staring. Even so, the distance is unbridgeable enough that this strain of his work is the most pilfered, and the most controversial.
This is made more apparent in his treatment of the dead, which takes the concept of a “still life” to new extremes. A dog’s belly serves as a cornucopia. A head makes for an extravagant vase. A woman’s breast is barely distinguishable from fruit. One half of a head kisses the other. Some corpses, human and infant, are placed in religious poses that recall, if inexactly, the funereal intensity of Spanish Catholicism. Sometimes Witkin barely does anything. The head on a plate is contrasted by a headless body sitting upright. Whether ornate or severe in presentation, the impact of these photos depend largely on the viewer’s own relationship to death, and an understanding of the past where mourning was not limited to a wake (such as post-mortem photography); and they lack, for instance, the bleak matter-of-factness of crime scene and accident photos, of which Witkin himself was not ignorant and and which he utilized to great effect elsewhere.
Witkin’s earliest technical experience came during military service as a photographer for the army. This sometimes entailed photographing deaths from suicides and accidents. This training was thought to be the extent of the medium’s merit, where moments were incidents, details were data, and the finished print was secondary reference rather than primary absorption. As he transitioned from army to art school, he spun that elementary imperative of getting as much useful data into the frame as possible into an aesthetic one.
After some early Arbusian street documentation across the 1960s and 1970s, Witkin refined the stylistic sparseness for his conceptual shots. The Baroque clarity and surreal drama that would become his signature was still forthcoming. Instead, Witkin pursued methods of obscurity and omission; a great deal of technical work went into creating an aura akin to something you discover unexpectedly in a tin in a crawlspace before casting into a fire. You don’t really know what the object is in the middle of LA Death (1976), or its significance, but you drift inevitably to the left where a woman with a scratched-out face is just about the exit the frame, and are more troubled. Hooded Woman With White Dog (1976) suggests a morally emaciated David Lynch, as if Blue Velvet was seen entirely from Frank Booth’s perspective.
This phase of his work probably earned Witkin the distinction as a lesser Mapplethorpe, especially as he used a harder focus and explored explicitly sadomasochistic themes. Compare, if you so wish, Mapplethorpe’s exquisitely retouched fist-fucking images against Witkin’s own, Arm-Fuck, NYC (1982), which looks as if it was captured by Robert Capa in a cosmic void. The comparison is not inapt in general terms. Both artists are, in Schjeldahl’s words, “curdled” by Catholicism, both used Lisa Lyon as a model, and both were made an example of on the Senate floor by Jesse Helms. Yet the core of the criticism seems rooted less in quality than in the intent behind it. Mapplethorpe’s unflinching yet elegant portraiture betrayed a suitably modern, celebratory honesty. Witkin’s saturnine, surly, and simply repulsive tableaux are retrograde, aestheticizing shame and dragging stigma out of its tomb. It recalls Edward Said’s comparison of Samuel Johnson, the writer who “opens things out” against Jonathan Swift, who “shuts things down.”
Yet inspect Mapplethorpe more closely and the further away you get from him. That crystalline imagery takes on an icier aspect. The gaze is misanthropic and Medusa-like, petrifying the humanity out of every sitter, even himself. “When I have sex with someone,” he said, “I forget who I am. For a minute I even forget I’m human. It’s the same thing when I’m behind a camera. I forget I exist.” Mapplethorpe was the consummate edgelord: a fetishist of surfaces at the expense of life. It is not for nothing that his most perfect images were of flowers, statues, and warships. His work was modern and celebratory insofar as it celebrated himself, his pursuit of unblemished beauty, absolute pleasure, and personal glory.
Not that this brings Witkin into the warmth of contemporary morality. Indeed, there is something of the displaced Victorian about his early photographs. They recall the “black secrets” of Edward Hyde and the “strange rumours” surrounding Dorian Gray. They are not, as is cherished in Mapplethorpe, secrets being ushered triumphantly to the surface but secrets in search of new surfaces, texts looking for a willing sub. They yearn for life rather than deny it, and it could conceivably be your life they want. It is one thing to haunt mass culture, quite another to skulk mass consciousness looking to make eye contact.