It’s impossible to look away from the photographs of JPW that are cast and minted in his books, framed in gallery’s and in the collections of museums. Each image reveals an arousal of the senses. Some would use the word grotesque to describe his photographs or immediately want to reject them. I, however, find each one as an embrace of honesty, an exploration of sympathy and dignity in the people captured in them. The compositions, photographed and collaged, are aproned in an intimate disquiet that reveals the tenderness of the human condition and the violence many of us have experienced, the violence that is always present, but that doesn’t define us, that makes us softer and more empathetic. A violence, perhaps, that others impose on us for being different. A reality exposed, a myth no more. When Joel was six years old, he witnessed a car crash on his way to church. Along with the noise and the chaos, the head of a young girl rolled by him. It was this which he credits as his first memory and is quoted later in life as saying, “to me, there is no difference between a flower and a severed arm or leg.”
Born in 1939 in Brooklyn, NY he was first commissioned by his brother Jerome in 1956 to photograph sideshow performers at Coney Island. Later, in 1961, he would enlist as a photographer in the US Army. I think, Witkin, by living and accepting people and life for what it is, has the capability of capturing the honesty of life and allowing a space for acceptance for those that don’t understand. Afterall, he says, ‘He is a portraitist, not of people, mind you, but of the conditions in which the people exist”. (This quote taken from a writing by Robert Delpire.)
-Jen Fisher