Joel-peter witkin art

Joel-peter witkin photos
Kersen witkin
Jerome witkin

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Joel-Peter Witkin

American photographer

Joel-Peter Witkin (born September 13, 1939) is an American photographer who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His work often deals with themes such as death, corpses (and sometimes dismembered portions thereof), often featuring ornately decorated photographic models, including people with dwarfism, transgender and intersex persons, as well as people living with a range of physical features. Witkin is often praised for presenting these figures in poses which celebrate and honor their physiques in an elevated, artistic manner. Witkin's complex tableaux vivants often recall religious episodes or classical paintings.^[1]

Biography

Witkin was born to a Jewish father and Roman Catholic mother. His twin brother, Jerome Witkin,^[2] and son Kersen Witkin, are also painters. Witkin's parents divorced when he was young because they were unable to overcome their religious differences. ^[2] He attended grammar school at Saint Cecelia's in Brooklyn and went on to Grover Cleveland High School.

In 1961 Witkin e

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Joel-Peter Witkin was born in Brooklyn in 1939. Early in life, he witnessed a gruesome car accident in which a little girl was decapitated. This traumatic event left an indelible mark on the artist’s psyche and would permeate all aspects of his creative vision and sensibility throughout his life. Witkin made his first photograph when he was eleven, and at sixteen Edward Steichen selected one of Witkin’s photographs for the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. At twenty-one Witkin enlisted as a Photographer in the U.S. Army from 1961 to 1964. In 1967, he became the official photographer for City Walls Inc. He received a bachelor’s degree in sculpture from Cooper Union in 1974. During this period Columbia University granted him a scholarship in poetry but he finished his graduate studies at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where he received both an M.A. and an M.F.A. in Photography.

Finding beauty within the grotesque, Witkin’s work extends beyond post-mortem photography with his staged set-ups of corpses and dismembered parts. Witk

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Joel-Peter Witkin

Joel-Peter Witkin (born September 13, 1939, in Brooklyn, New York City) is an American photographer who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His work often deals with such themes as death, corpses (and sometimes dismembered portions thereof), and various outsiders such as dwarves, transsexuals, hermaphrodites, and physically deformed people. Witkin's complex tableaux often recall religious episodes or classical paintings.

Witkin was born to a Jewish father and Roman Catholic mother. His twin brother, Jerome Witkin, and son Kersen Witkin, are also painters. Witkin's parents divorced when he was young because they were unable to overcome their religious differences. He attended grammar school at Saint Cecelia's in Brooklyn and went on to Grover Cleveland High School. Between

1961 and 1964 he was a war photographer documenting the Vietnam war. Going freelance in 1967, he became the official photographer for City Walls Inc. He attended Cooper Union in New York where he studied sculpture, attaining a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1974. After Columbia University grante