Review | Joel-Peter Witkin: Selected Works 1973–2018

September 1, 2026

Musée

by Anna Rose Goldwitz

Review | Joel-Peter Witkin: Selected Works 1973–2018

For more than half a century, Joel-Peter Witkin has made photographs that refuse the comfort of easy looking. Bodies become saints, monsters, martyrs, allegories, and works of art; death inhabits the same theatrical spaces as eroticism; and the history of Western painting is dismantled and reconstructed through the camera. In Joel-Peter Witkin: Selected Works 1973–2018, on view at Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles through September 26, 2026, more than four decades of Witkin’s practice come together as an extended meditation on what photography can reveal when beauty and horror are no longer treated as opposites.

The exhibition arrives at a particularly significant moment in Witkin’s career. Born in Brooklyn in 1939, Witkin worked as a photographer in the U.S. Army before studying sculpture at Cooper Union and earning graduate degrees in photography at the University of New Mexico. His work now belongs to collections ranging from the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Centre Pompidou and the Victoria and Albert Museum. In 2026, he was also inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame as the recipient of its Visionary Award. Yet the significance of Selected Works lies less in institutional recognition than in the opportunity to see how remarkably consistent—and increasingly expansive—Witkin’s visual universe has remained.

Witkin approaches photography less as a means of recording the visible world than as a way of constructing another one. His images begin with elaborate tableaux: painted backdrops, costumes, bodies, animals, masks, religious symbols, art-historical quotations, and objects arranged with almost obsessive precision. The photographic negative is not an endpoint. Witkin scratches, bleaches, tones, and draws upon his images, treating the photographic surface as a physical object that can be scarred and transformed. The resulting photographs often appear simultaneously ancient and artificial, as though unearthed from some damaged archive of an alternative history.

That sense of temporal dislocation is crucial to Witkin’s art. His photographs are crowded with the ghosts of earlier images. Goya, Velázquez, Picasso, Courbet, Christian iconography, mythology, and nineteenth-century studio photography coexist with contemporary bodies and political references. Rather than merely quoting art history, Witkin stages confrontations with it.

Studio of the Painter (Courbet), Paris (1990), for instance, transforms Gustave Courbet’s monumental 1855 painting The Artist’s Studio into a photographic theater. Figures occupy an intentionally artificial environment in which painted landscape, staged bodies, props, and the mechanisms of image-making collide. Witkin exposes precisely what traditional illusionistic painting often attempts to conceal: the construction of the image itself. The studio becomes simultaneously subject, stage, and metaphor. Photography does not replace painting here; it enters into an argument with it.

In Picasso in Purgatory (collage), NM (2015), that dialogue becomes even more fragmented. A sculptural, Picasso-like face floats within a dense collision of photographic and drawn forms, anatomical references, landscape, and art-historical imagery. Witkin breaks apart the distinction between photograph, collage, drawing, and sculpture. Picasso becomes less an individual artist than a spectral presence within a visual culture continually consuming and remaking its own past.

But Witkin's appropriations are never simply exercises in formal homage. Art history provides him with a vocabulary through which to speak about mortality, sexuality, power, religion, and the instability of the human body.

Few images demonstrate this more forcefully than The Graces, LA (1988). Three nude figures stand together against a dark backdrop, recalling the classical Three Graces while simultaneously disrupting nearly every expectation associated with that motif. Their masks conceal rather than reveal identity; their bodies resist the idealization traditionally demanded of the nude; small objects held in their hands introduce an uncanny, almost ritualistic dimension. The deteriorated-looking photographic surface further removes them from conventional representations of polished bodily perfection.

The photograph encapsulates one of Witkin’s most important propositions: beauty does not require bodily conformity. Throughout his career, he has photographed bodies historically excluded from both popular imagery and the classical artistic canon. The gallery describes his work as challenging established notions of “normalcy and humanity,” particularly through his representation of people marginalized within conventional depictions of the body. Yet Witkin's photographs make that challenge deliberately difficult. They do not simply celebrate difference. They transform bodies into allegorical figures within elaborate fantasies, producing a persistent ethical tension between visibility, theatricalization, reverence, and spectacle.

That tension is part of what makes the photographs remain uncomfortable decades after their creation.

In Imperfect Thirst, NM (2016), a nude woman appears in profile beneath the arching body of a large fish. The curve of the animal echoes the human figure while transforming her head into something between a headdress, halo, and hybrid anatomy. A halved pomegranate rests before her. Human body, animal body, fruit, sexuality, and mortality become elements of a contemporary still life. The image is strange without being chaotic. Its stillness is almost devotional.

Nature Sees the First Human Death, Mexico (2017) similarly transforms the human body through mythology. A female figure wearing the head of a deer stands against an Arcadian painted landscape holding a cornucopia, while a seemingly dead human body lies at her feet and a dog looks upward. The title reverses the familiar relationship between humanity and nature: instead of humans observing and classifying the natural world, Nature witnesses us. Death becomes not the conclusion of nature but an event occurring within it.

Animals repeatedly destabilize the distinction between human and nonhuman throughout these works. Bodies merge visually with fish, deer, dogs, birds, and other creatures, suggesting a world in which human exceptionalism has become uncertain. Witkin’s hybrid figures recall mythology, but they also undermine the supposedly stable boundaries through which Western culture has historically organized bodies.

Religion provides another persistent framework. Witkin’s imagery is saturated with crosses, martyrdom, resurrection, saints, devils, relics, sacrifice, and the possibility of redemption. Yet his Catholic visual vocabulary rarely offers uncomplicated salvation. Sacred imagery repeatedly collides with sexuality and physical decay.

The History of the Cross, the Tripod and Photography, Bogota (2011) makes the connection between religion and image-making explicit. Witkin constructs a fictional history linking the Cross to the invention of photography, surrounding photographic tableaux with a handwritten narrative. The work is absurd, reverent, blasphemous, and self-conscious at once. The camera becomes another instrument through which humanity attempts to confront truth—a secular descendant of the sacred relic.

Witkin's irreverence becomes more openly satirical in Christ Dismissing the Fashionable Artists from the Temple of Art, NN (2017). Its elaborate theatrical composition turns contemporary art into a kind of fallen religion. Bodies, money, classical architecture, Christian imagery inhabit the same absurd stage. The photograph resembles an altarpiece corrupted by commerce and performance. Witkin places himself within the art-historical tradition while simultaneously mocking the institutions and fashions through which artistic value is constructed.

Politics receives similarly theatrical treatment. The Raft of George W. Bush, NM (2006) transforms Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa into a sprawling allegory of contemporary America. Bodies collapse, reach, struggle, and pile across a makeshift raft beneath a violently painted sky. Witkin replaces Géricault's shipwreck survivors with a chaotic contemporary cast, turning an icon of nineteenth-century history painting into political satire. The reference matters precisely because Géricault's painting transformed catastrophe into monumental spectacle. Witkin borrows that visual language to ask what catastrophe looks like in an age already saturated with images.

Across Selected Works, Witkin repeatedly returns to this uneasy relationship between suffering and spectacle. His photographs are seductive precisely when their subjects tell us they should not be. Their tonal richness, elaborate compositions, tactile surfaces, and extraordinary attention to detail reward prolonged looking, while their content frequently makes prolonged looking uncomfortable. That contradiction is not incidental. It is the engine of the work.

Witkin understands that the history of art is filled with violence made beautiful: crucifixions, martyrdoms, executions, shipwrecks, mutilated saints, mythological punishments, and eroticized corpses. His photographs inherit that tradition while refusing to disguise its contradictions. He makes the viewer conscious of wanting to look.

The exhibition's four-decade span demonstrates how persistent this question has been throughout Witkin’s career. Even as the imagery expands from intimate bodily studies toward increasingly elaborate political, religious, and art-historical allegories, the central question remains remarkably stable: what kinds of bodies are permitted to become beautiful images, and what happens when photography refuses those limits?

Perhaps one answer appears in The Soul Has No Gender, Mexico(2016). A seated nude figure holds a human skull while looking directly toward the camera. The body complicates conventional gender categories, while the skull functions as the great equalizer of Witkin's universe. Gender, beauty, age, physical difference, and social identity belong to the temporary body; mortality belongs to everyone. Yet the portrait is neither clinical nor tragic. The sitter possesses an almost regal composure. That image provides an important counterweight to the spectacle surrounding it. Beneath Witkin’s grotesquerie lies an unexpectedly persistent humanism. His work can be provocative, excessive, funny, disturbing, politically abrasive, and intentionally offensive to conventional taste, but its deepest concern is less monstrosity than the cultural mechanisms through which we decide who—or what—becomes monstrous.

Joel-Peter Witkin: Selected Works 1973–2018 therefore succeeds not simply as a retrospective survey but as an argument for the continuing difficulty of Witkin's photographs. They refuse to settle into categories of beautiful or ugly, sacred or obscene, compassionate or exploitative. Instead, those categories contaminate one another.

Photography, in Witkin's hands, becomes something closer to an alchemical process. Flesh becomes symbol; paintings become photographs; photographs become wounded objects; the living impersonate the dead; animals become human and humans become mythological creatures. The history of art is resurrected only to be altered again. What remains constant is the body—imperfect, desiring, theatrical, vulnerable, and mortal. Witkin asks us to look at it even when we would rather turn away. More provocatively, he asks why we wanted to turn away in the first place.