Testicle Stretch with the Possibility of a Crushed Face, New
Mexico, 1982
Side Show Banner, New Mexico, 1986
Woman on a Table, New Mexico, 1987
Gods of Earth and Heaven, Los Angeles, 1988
Head of a Dead Man, Mexico, 1990
Feast of Fools, 1990
Cupid and Centaur in the Museum of Love, Marseilles, 1992
The Cuisine of a Failed Romance, Buenos Aires, 2003
Further Reading
Celant, Germano.Witkin.New York: Scalo/D.A.P., 1995.
Coke, Van Deren.Joel-Peter Witkin: Forty Photographs.San
Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1985.
Harris, Melissa, ed.On Location: With Annie Leibovitz,
Lorna Simpson, Susan Meiselas, Cindy Sherman, Adam
Fuss, Joel-Peter Witkin, Jon Goodman.New York: Aper-
ture Foundation, Inc., 1993.
Witkins, Joel Peter.Joel-Peter Witkin.London: Phaidon,
2001.
———.Gods of Earth and Heaven.Pasadena, CA: Twelve-
trees Press, 1989.
Witkin, Joel-Peter, ed.Harms Way: Lust & Madness, Mur-
der & Mayhem: A Book of Photographs.Santa Fe: Twin
Palms Publishers, 1994.
Witkin, Joel-Peter, ed.Masterpieces of Medical Photogra-
phy: Selections from the Burns Archive.Pasadena, CA:
Twelvetrees Press, 1987.STEFAN WOJNECKI
Polish
Stefan Wojnecki is one of the most distinguished
Polish photographers. His career is not limited to
the practice of photography, but includes roles as a
theorist, philosopher, and art teacher. In addition,
Wojnecki has organized numerous exhibitions that
focus on new artistic practices and was the director,
between 1991 and 2000, of the six international
Photographic Workshops calledProfile.Heisoften
described in the context of ‘‘post-media photogra-
phy,’’ which looks beyond photography’s traditional
imagistic usage to physical and optical processes that
create images not otherwise visible.
Born in 1929, Wojnecki studied physics at Poz-
nan ́University; he graduated in 1952. While work-
ing as a physicist and teacher in the mid-1950s, he
took up photography, practicing what he has
described as ‘‘socially engaged’’. But from the
beginning Wojnecki’s work in photography had a
foothold in the scientific field. His career is marked
by two distinct elements: technological research
and reflection about photographic practice. His
works can be seen as a succession of images that
illustrate his various scientific experimentations
related to physics and optics and is closely linked
to how scientists perceive information as an image
and how this affects scientific progress, as in the
seriesW Kosmos, of 1958.
In a first reading, Wojnecki’s pictures seem to be
like a personal diary, a log where each picture
becomes the equivalent of a manuscript annotation
(Maszt antenowy, 1966, or Rozklad energetycny,
1962). There is a will, however, to encompass the
collective into a personal vision. Thus he conceives
singular images that relate a world—his own world—
while reflecting a sociological reality and the historic
context of Poland during the last 40 years (Fotografia
Tozsamosvci, 1981).
Gradually, his images juxtapose a political vision
upon the simple representation of physics phenom-
ena. His pictures represent stable moments, well-
balanced and well-thought-out actions. Even so
they swing to something else—his own thought.
Wojnecki pictures give life to the materials: those
used at the moment of the shooting and those
represented by the shooting. His images go beyond
the represented reality, they exceed the object sur-
face, they contravene forms in order to keep the
viewer in a thought about deepness.
In the early 1960s, Wojnecki’s work was directed
toward a research on technical characteristics of
material, specifically, the transmission of images
and the way they determine perception. He invented
an ultra-fast miniaturized shutter in 1965 and a
stereoscopic A4 enlarger with a half-tone screen
lens, building this equipment in order to experiment
with the technological and perceptive potential of an
image. The stereoscopic enlarger was used in his
Duogrammesseries. In addition, in his theoretical
writings Wojnecki uses the development of his equip-
ment in order to define, understand, and improveWOJNECKI, STEFAN