Framing the Body: A Critical Look at Witkin’s Photographic Legacy

This post is an excerpt from my article on Sixty Inches From Center, which supports and promotes art and writing that thrives primarily outside of mainstream historical narratives.

“Brilliant and divisive,” those were the words Catherine Edelman, gallery owner and panel moderator, used to describe acclaimed photographer Joel-Peter Witkin. The latest exhibition at Catherine Edelman Gallery, Joel-Peter Witkin: From the Studio, features more than 25 photographs, 80 drawings, as well as sketchbooks and journals, darkroom tools and cameras, letters, and contact sheets. But it was Witkins mission, “to create photographs that show the beauty of marginalized people,” and how he executes that aim was the primary topic of discussion for the ‘Otherness & Beauty’ panel hosted by the gallery on June 1. The panel included painter, writer and disability activist Riva Lehrer, art therapist Deb DelSignore, and art historian Mark B. Pohlad.

Witkin, an American artist based in Albuquerque, photographs his subjects in carefully crafted settings and utilizes manual darkroom techniques to produce surreal images. The subjects are often “intersex, post and pre-op individuals, and people born with physical abnormalities.” Lehrer makes artwork depicting similar marginalized people, with one very important difference—she is a portrait artist. Lehrer works collaboratively with her subjects to portray their individuality, regularly subverting stereotypes. Witkin’s work is decidedly figurative, rather than portraiture. In figurative work, subjects are “subservient to and at the mercy of the artist,” Lehrer explained; they disappear into the narrative, becoming actors rather than people. Through his work, Witkin is “constantly obliterating the body,” creating a “destruction of wholeness,” said Lehrer, that reinforces the portrayal of disabled bodies in the art historical canon. For centuries, people with disabilities were used to show the healing power of God, violently used as props to demonstrate religious lessons. Because Witkin references art history so directly (his The Raft of George W. Bush, NM is an obvious parody of Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa), this context cannot be ignored.

Witkin sees his work as “elevating

marginalized people to the point of beauty,” said Edelman. This implies that marginalized people need the non-marginalized to take some kind of action in order to make them beautiful, which couldn’t be further from the truth. This difficult portrayal of ‘otherness’ is further complicated by Witkin’s recent diagnosis of dementia. Witkin has stated that A Mermaid’s Tale will be his last photograph, as his symptoms have “left him unable to create art.” Art therapist DelSignore noted that “he may begin to experience this otherness himself.” While some questioned why his work has to come to an end since people often continue creative expression through conditions like dementia, there was an emphasis on respecting people’s self-identified capacities and that those capacities are ever-changing.

Read the rest of this piece at Sixty Inches From Center.

Joel-Peter Witkin: From the Studio is on view at Catherine Edelman Gallery’s new location in West Town through July 3, 2019. You can view more of Michael Taylor Orr’s work on Instagram and Riva Lehrer’s work on her website.