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-- William A. Ewing
"The Body: Photoworks of the Human Form"

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True perverts are born, not made.

Those who are truly bewitched by a good/evil power play in their sexuality, those who have a deep impulse to stick pins in their scrotums and hooks in their nipples, or be mummified, tied up and caned by mean women in tall boots, are slightly different from other people.

Portfolio A Joel-Peter Witkin gallery A selection of photographs by Joel-Peter Witkin. (Click to display images in a new browser window. Best viewed with browsers higher than 3.0)

Those who have tried to embrace a more "kinky" sexuality than the one they naturally possess and found themselves lacking the vital chromosome necessary know what I mean. To the so-called normal brain of the average sexual pedestrian, the black latex, hardware and dire theatrics seem more campy and silly than erotic.

The true perv, however, needs and believes in a fearful, deviant badness and hellishness in sexuality, and responds to it with all the mordant, ritualistic seriousness and ceremony of a Black Mass. If you have ever watched someone handle a pair of spike-heeled shoes with trembling awe, while you giggled uncomfortably, you know what I'm talking about.

I believe that Joel-Peter Witkin is a true, born pervert –- in the visual sphere that is. What his sexual predilections are I wouldn't know. Witkin is a photographer who has been mistaken for a grave robber, whose works were described by Marina Isola in TheMet as "Part Hieronymus Bosch, part 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre.'"

He has been the reigning king of deviant imagery -- indeed, the thinking Goth's favorite artist -- since he came to public acclaim in the 1980s with his delicately posed corpses and bravely naked mutants, floridly arranged in beaten-silvertone, antique nightmare-scapes.

Witkin's visual world evokes a Byronesque mortician's playroom from some particularly grim 19th century fairy tale, or a weird and ghastly accident of the arts that everyone would sooner put behind them -- the Renaissance, Picasso, Miro, Mapplethorpe and Buñuel after a horrific spin through a large blender; everybody's legs and arms missing, recognizable styles poking through among the tattered meats, genitals and mercury.

Joel-Peter Witkin tore his way out of the womb on Sept, 13, 1939, in Brooklyn, N.Y. His father was a Jewish glazier, his mother a Roman Catholic who worked in a DDT plant. His parents were unable to transcend their religious differences and the two divorced when Witkin was young, the boy remaining with his mother. He attended grammar school at Saint Cecelia's in Brooklyn, and went on to Grover Cleveland High School.

In his 1998 book "The Bone House," Witkin claims that his unique visual sensibilities began to churn when, as a small child, he witnessed a terrible car accident in front of his home, in which a little girl was decapitated. He recalls her head rolling to his feet, her dead eyes staring upward. Witkin also cites urban crime photographer Weegee as an early influence.

In an interview with Michael Sand that appeared in World Art in January 1996, Witkin credited his father for having instilled his own latent photographic ambitions in his young son:

He took me aside and showed me some clips from Life magazine or Look magazine, the Daily Mirror, or the News (he wasn't a New York Times reader). I was about 5, and I knew when he was showing me these photographs that he was telling me he couldn't do this, but maybe there was a chance that part of him could, somehow, through me. Without saying it, I looked at him, and I knew, and he knew, that I could try.

In his 1995 book "Witkin," the photographer writes: "I began making photographs when I was sixteen. That same year, Edward Steichen selected one of my photographs to be included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. That was the beginning of a life devoted to photography."

After high school, Witkin got jobs that would enable him to learn the nuts and bolts of photographic technique. He worked as a color photography printer until he enlisted in the Army in 1961, where he served as a technical sergeant and worked as a photo technician and a photographer, documenting assorted military accidents, until 1964.

After the Army, he returned to New York and worked as a professional freelance assistant for technical, medical and commercial photographers. He earned a BFA from Cooper Union on the G.I. Bill, studying sculpture, and received a fellowship in poetry from Columbia University. In 1974, Witkin was awarded a CAPS grant in photography through the New York State Council on the Arts.

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