.Art Macabre.

In this decaying world, where death lurks in every corner.... it's not a surprise that macabre and death turned out to be ... ART. Grotesque art.

I think the most famous photographer of death is Joel-Peter Witkin with his darkly imaginative photography confronts us with both sex and mortality with subjects that include from corpses (or pieces of them) to various outsiders such as physically deformed people, hermaphrodites, transsexuals, giants, dwarfs, Siamese twins, elephant man.Witkin's grotesque art spurred violent reactions for many years... The fine line between the rational and the vulgar, gives overwhelming emotions to the spectator.The ability to transform sexual exiles, headless corpses and circus freaks into something to be marveled at, something nearly beautiful, is part of Witkin's genius.




Despite the fact that his art is unique in a grotesque way, many of his photos are made after paintings of renown old masters like Botticelli, Rafael, Rubens, Velasquez, Goya, Géricault, Odilon Redon and Seurat. The majority of his photos are not mere copies of 'found reality', but rather emphatically staged dramas, just like many traditional paintings.



Joel-Peter Witkin's morbid and arresting images are often criticized for the excessive borrowing of mythological, historical figures and symbols.His obsession to reveal the potential of horror and suffering in the human condition show us our powerlessness in the face of madness, lust, disease and death.The generally necrotic black and white photographs are manipulated with a highly instinctive method of development, Witkin physically scratches his negatives, burns, tones and bleaches his photographic paper and challenges the purity of the untouched photograph. The effect presses us forward into the photographer's nightmarish vision in which preconceptions of physical beauty are torn to shreds.