Witkin: Freak Show or Beauty?

Paper Summary:

This paper explores the concept of beauty in Witkin's photography. It looks at the techniques he uses to create pictures like paintings. It discusses some early childhood influences on his work and the difficulty of classifying him as any particular type of photographer. It studies the relationship between his work and glass (the properties of glass) and analyzes his picture entitled "Glassman". Next, the paper moves on to another work of Witkin's, entitled "Waiting for De Chirico", discussing its comment on surrealism and use of foreground, middle-ground and background. The paper then moves on to an analysis of Witkin's "Daphne and Appollo", exploring its message about love. The paper concludes by highlighting the commonalities between the three above-mentioned paintings.

From the Paper:

"While Joel-Peter Witkin may well be a virtuoso technician pushing the envelope with his creative skills, it is seldom his technique that causes people to stop and stare at his work, as well as very frequently stop people from looking at his work altogether. To call him the master of the macabre is to think of him as a storyteller in the fashion of Poe. However, unlike Poe, he is no romantic; he is not interested in ironic twists but rather presents himself as a reporter on the human condition, and on the bubbling unconscious of humans trapped in this world of so many contradictions."

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