Robert Delpire, when he was the Director of The National Center of Photography, conceived the first large exhibition in France dedicated to Joel-Peter Witkin. For the last 2 years, he has been working with Witkin to achieve this book of 304 pages that is not a simple monograph but an anthology that aims to demonstrate the approach and the process of this creator. “The purpose of this book is to be a compilation, a testimony that is as comprehensive as possible.”


If the result is materialized in the photographic medium, the approach starts somewhere else. Witkin creates the photograph that he wants to shoot. Everything is anticipated, from the study sketch to the research and acquisition of diverse accessories and costumes, as well as the precise location of the lighting. After the shoot there are also chemical transformations (multiple creative shifts…) as well as manual transformations (scraping, ripping, scuffing, incising…but also retouching, overloading paint, collages and encaustic painting). These are precisely all the different stages of the creative process that Robert Delpire wanted us to share in this book that contains 89 photographs chosen to give a sense of Witkin’s approach. The editing has been done by Joel-Peter Witkin and Robert Delpire, who writes in the forward of the book to “show the richness of the images, the classical as well as the most recent work, while emphasizing certain details that may escape the attention of fascinated readers, and, after careful examination, beyond the sumptuousness of the composition, prove the obsessively recurrent themes of the Witkinian world.”

In addition to the 89 photographs published, there are 68 details, 24 pages of sketch and preparatory drawings and a text, Crazy About Christ by Eugenia Parry, who aims to give clues, if not guidelines to his work.

As a preamble to this book, Joel-Peter Witkin reveals a selective list of his interests. Various natural wonders: microcephalic people, dwarfs, giants, hunchbacks, transsexuals before surgery, women with hairy faces or large skin lesions ready to pose in a cocktail dress, five androgynous people posing together to embody The Young Ladies of Avignon by Picasso, bald anorexics…he says himself that he is a “black poem.” 
Robert Delpire, dedicates the book to this man, the one who wrote the black poem that no one else could have composed: “It is to Joel-Peter Witkin that we open the pages of this book. It is published within a collection called Maestro, in which he is featured alongside big names such as: Cartier-Bresson, Marey and Koudelka.”

Bernard Perrine
Bernard.Perrine1@orange.fr

Publication

Witkin
Text by Eugenia Parry

Éditions Delpire
collection Maestro
Hardcover with dustjacket
304 pages, format 295x285mm
Bilingual French/English