to have seen and spoken with God.) Witkin received
formal training in photography while serving in the
U.S. Army from 1961 to 1964. Although his assign-
ment as a combat photographer and photographic
technician exposed him to numerous accidents and
deaths, Witkin’s years in the military did not con-
stitute his first experience with the macabre. He cites
his earliest brush with death, an event that occurred
in Brooklyn when he was six years old, as the inci-
dent that was highly pivotal in his development as a
photographer. After witnessing a car accident, he
claims that a young girl’s decapitated head rolled
to a stop at the curb where he stood watching:
This, my first conscious visual experience, has left its
mark. Out of it I see many roots extending to my visual
work in my use of severed heads, masks, and my con-
cern with violence, pain, and death. I am no longer the
helpless observer, but the objectifier who chooses to
share the ‘hell’ of his confusion visually, rather than to
confront the quality that distinguishes a vital and func-
tional being from a dead body
(Celant 1995, 49).
Witkin’s use of this story to describe the origins of
his work is also indicative of the narrative quality of
his writing style, a trait that earned him a poetry
fellowship at Columbia University in 1974. While he
did indeed witness a car accident in which a young
girl died, family members insist that no head came to
rest at Witkin’s feet, and that the story is a mani-
festation of his active imagination, which continues
to serve as an intrinsic element in the development of
his photographs. This element of neo-surrealist nar-
rative deeply imbues his photographs with a sense of
the mystical and the macabre.
After leaving the military in 1964, Witkin re-
turned to The Cooper Union School for the Ad-
vancement of Science and Art in New York, where
he had studied sculpture from 1958 to 1960. He
received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1974,
and relocated to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where
he continues to live and work. Witkin began work-
ing towards his M.F.A. in photography at the Uni-
versity of New Mexico in 1975, a degree that he
obtained in 1986.
Witkin’s method diverges from that of most pho-
tographers in that he sketches out his ideas for
images prior to assembling the materials needed for
the photo shoot. The resulting black and white prints
are achieved through scratching the negative, print-
ing through tissue paper, and toning select areas of
the print, all in an effort to lend the image a dis-
tressed appearance, echoing the delicate condition of
many surviving nineteenth-century photographs.
His interest in religious dogma and symbolism is
evident in imagery that evokes spirituality, suffering,
and death that refers to such artistic conventions as
the crucifixion.
Although Witkin cites German photographer
August Sander as a primary influence on his photo-
graphy, even though Sander’s stiffly posed but nat-
uralistic portraits may seem to have no obvious
commonalities, critics have compared his work to
that of the Americans Diane Arbus and Weegee,
who were also interested in capturing the violent
and the macabre.
But Witkin’s penchant for the exaggerated pecu-
liar in his photographs moves beyond the styles of
his predecessors, and has led Witkin to seek out
models in a unique manner. In his monograph pub-
lished in 1985, as well as the 1989 bookGods of Earth
and Heaven, the photographer’s afterword adver-
tised for ‘‘physical prodigies of all kinds,’’ including
‘‘people with tails, horns, wings, fins, claws, reversed
feet or hands, elephantine limbs, etc. Anyone with
additional arms, legs, eyes, breasts, genitals, ears,
nose, lips...all manner of extreme visual perversions’’
(Witkin 1989).
He places his ‘‘physical prodigies’’ as well as
amputated limbs, dead animals, and other un-
usual props, into compositions that often closely
mimic seminal paintings from the Renaissance,
Baroque, and later art historical periods.Gods of
Earth and Heaven, Los Angeles (1988) draws
directly from Sandro Botticelli’s painting The
Birth of Venus(c. 1482), but Witkin has replaced
the central figure of Venus with a pre-operative
hermaphrodite, providing an unexpected twist to
an otherwise familiar scene. His photograph
Head of a Dead Man, Mexico(1990), is reminis-
cent of many representations of the severed head
of St. John the Baptist as it rests lifeless upon a
platter. The head chosen for this image was
selected when Witkin traveled to a forensic hos-
pital in Mexico City, Mexico, in 1990 and photo-
graphed a number of unclaimed cadavers.
It was here that Witkin also produced his highly
controversial Feast of Fools (1990), a Baroque-
inspired vanitas in which bountiful grapes and
pomegranates have been intertwined with am-
putated limbs and a dead infant. Such use of the
human body has raised the ire of many critics. In
1992, protesters in Washington, D.C., who objected
to the NEA’s distribution of funds used Witkin’s
grisly Testicle Stretch with the Possibility of a
Crushed Face, New Mexico(1982), as a symbol of
the type of artwork the government agency consid-
ered highly offensive.
Witkin’s work has been widely collected, including
at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Vic-WITKIN, JOEL-PETER