LOS ANGELES — Although octogenarian Joel-Peter Witkin’s photography has sparked controversy for its sometimes macabre subject matter, his five-decade retrospective at Fahey/Klein Gallery reveals the practicing Catholic’s ongoing dedication to the principle that “we are all God’s children.” From the 1970s through 2018, when Witkin was diagnosed with dementia, he created tableau vivant photographs, using live models, props, and elaborate sets to create morality tales that blend elements of mythology, the Bible, and art history to express compassion for the marginalized, including people with dwarfism, amputees, and members of the LGBTQ+ community, especially those who are intersex.
Working exclusively with traditional cameras and black-and-white film, Witkin approaches each photo shoot like a director making a movie, building a set and developing his own prints. For expressive content, he often scratches a negative and treats an emerging print with bleach or encaustic, which can produce textural effects or color highlights.
Witkin first explored gender bending in works such as “Ecce Homo, NYC” (1975), where a male hippie with sunglasses poses nude wearing high heels, his penis barely visible in dark shadows. The title equates him with art historical representations of Christ, while spotlighting his left foot on a draped table focuses on the female shoe and suggests that wearing it is a subversive act. A similar blend of dignity and edginess can be observed in multiple representations of intersex models, such as “The Three Graces, New Mexico” (1988), “Gods of Earth and Heaven, LA” (1988), which mimics Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus” (c. 1484–86), and “The Soul Has No Gender, Mexico” (2016), where a nude intersex person with long flowing hair is portrayed in radiant light holding a skull, in the tradition of memento mori portraiture. Three nails propped against the wall to the figure’s right suggest parallels between the persecution of Christ and the prejudicial abuses that people born with both male and female anatomy face today.
The controversial “The Kiss (Le Braiser)” (1982) is among Witkin’s most metaphorically potent works. The subject appears to be two men smooching, yet it was actually constructed from a corpse’s head split in half, with one side turned around and pressed against the other. While symbolically affirming the legitimacy of same sex lovemaking, the imagery also conjures associations with narcissism and Witkin’s status as an identical twin (to another artist, the painter Jerome Witkin).
