Joel-Peter Witkin Enfer ou Ciel

Born in 1939 in New York, photographer Joel Peter Witkin is at the peak of his career in photography. The vast repertoire of references supporting his research plastic finds its coherence through two fundamental themes, Eros and the Sacred.

The early work of Witkin has been a kind of a freak show: the interest he maintains in marginal environments determine his visual universe and his style of shooting. His work focuses on an indoor photography and shows unusual patterns, created in the course of his experience.

Witkin’s photographs agency with the greatest attention to detail, on the basis of a rigorous staging. His knowledge of the great classical painting asserts itself in the themes and image processing, prepared by accurate sketches in pencil or charcoal. It produces few photographs and derives its sumptuous events in very limited numbers.