Joel-Peter Witkin’s art celebrates marginalized people
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Joel-Peter Witkin, an 80-year-old photographer in Los Angeles, created elaborate photographs from the 1970s to 2018 that aimed to express compassion for people society often overlooks.
Witkin’s work blends mythology, biblical stories, and art history, focusing on subjects including people with dwarfism, amputees, and members of the LGBTQ+ community, particularly intersex individuals.
He approached each photograph like a film director, constructing sets and developing prints using traditional cameras and black-and-white film, often manipulating the negatives and prints to achieve specific effects. Witkin explored themes of gender and identity early in his career, as seen in photos like “Ecce Homo, NYC” (1975), which depicts a man in heels and draws parallels between the subject and images of Christ.
He continued this exploration in works featuring intersex models, such as “The Soul Has No Gender, Mexico” (2016), where he connected the persecution of Christ to the prejudice faced by people with both male and female anatomy. Some of Witkin’s most striking images, like “The Kiss (Le Braiser)” (1982), are deliberately provocative. This photograph, created from a split and reversed corpse’s head, symbolized both same-sex love and the artist’s own experience as an identical twin.
Though diagnosed with dementia in 2018, Witkin’s five-decade retrospective at Fahey/Klein Gallery demonstrates his consistent dedication to portraying all people as “God’s children.”
