Joel-Peter Witkin: A Retrospective
At the age of 6, Joel-Peter Witkin witnessed an automobile accident in which a little girl was decapitated, her head rolling to a stop at his feet. This experience may have had a bearing on his lifelong obsession with the macabre, but does little to prepare the viewer for his bizarre photographs of hermaphrodites and other human grotesqueries. Imagine the fruits of a collaboration between Diane Arbus and Federico Fellini that might be rejected for being a little too extreme. Imagine what Larry Flynt might publish for residents of theTwilight Zone.Two of the milder images: the disembodied, almost skeletal heads of two gnarled old men locked in an intimate kiss; and an obese woman in a cone-shaped mask, breast-feeding an eel.