Joel-Peter Witkin was born in Brooklyn in 1939. Early in life, he witnessed a gruesome car accident in which a little girl was decapitated. This traumatic event left an indelible mark on the artist’s psyche and would permeate all aspects of his creative vision and sensibility throughout his life. Witkin made his first photograph when he was eleven, and at sixteen Edward Steichen selected one of Witkin’s photographs for the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. At twenty-one Witkin enlisted as a Photographer in the U.S. Army from 1961 to 1964. In 1967, he became the official photographer for City Walls Inc. He received a bachelor’s degree in sculpture from Cooper Union in 1974. During this period Columbia University granted him a scholarship in poetry but he finished his graduate studies at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where he received both an M.A. and an M.F.A. in Photography.
Finding beauty within the grotesque, Witkin’s work extends beyond post-mortem photography with his staged set-ups of corpses and dismembered parts. Witkin has also pursued his interest in the human condition, drawing attention to “the other,” photographing marginalized groups of people. Those often cast aside by society—hermaphrodites, dwarfs, amputees, androgynes— inspire his work as he confronts the viewers’ sense of normalcy.
Joel-Peter Witkin’s photographs have been exhibited in museum and gallery exhibitions around the world, with over (150) solo exhibitions. In 1996, Witkin was given a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and more recently, in October 2022, he was part of a group exhibition titled, Les Choses, at the Louvre Museum in Paris. He is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including four photography fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. He was made Chevalier of Arts and Letters of France in 1990 and Commander of Arts and Letters of France in 2000. Witkin’s works are held in numerous public and private collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Centre George Pompidou, Paris; Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), London; Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, among others. The artist currently lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.