You don’t walk into a Witkin show without a shiver. From his studio in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the photographer, born in Brooklyn in 1939, has built a body of work that this California exhibition gathers in its most celebrated images, alongside rarer prints, tracing the arc of a career that resists easy categories.
The Raft of George W. Bush (NM, 2006) offers the most audacious proof of it. Witkin hijacks Géricault’s famous Raft of the Medusa to set adrift the former president, his mother Barbara, along with Condoleezza Rice, then Secretary of State, former Vice President Dick Cheney, and Colin Powell, a former Secretary of State, caught in comic and unflattering poses. The artist calls it “a contemporary ‘Ship of Fools,'” in which an angel “holds a large bone signifying cannibalistic capitalism, that charnel house of our dismal social progress.”
Beneath the provocateur lurks a relentless worker. Before photographing bodies, Joel-Peter Witkin served as a photographer in the US Army. Armed with formidable academic credentials, a double master’s degree in arts and fine arts, he brings an almost architectural attention to matter itself. Each image is born of a deliberately unhurried process. For his compositions, the artist builds entire studio scenes from painted backdrops, symbolic props, and meticulously choreographed figures, in the lineage of the great Spanish masters of painting: Goya, Velázquez, and Picasso.
This devotion to decorum carries through in his stubborn refusal of digital retouching. Witkin, who works exclusively on film, prefers to subject his negatives and prints to intense physical manipulation, scratching, tearing, bleaching, encaustic, hand-drawing, hand-tinting, giving his images a dense texture that sits somewhere between photograph and painting. Collage, another of his obsessions, conjures a cubist face out of a tangle of materials in Picasso In Purgatory (NM, 2015), as if pulled from a dream.
Humor is rarely absent. In Witkin’s hands, it flirts with sacrilege. Hitler Posing with The Anti-Christ, 1937 (Maquette, NM, 2015) is further proof, blending the grotesque and history with a nonchalance that never excludes gravity. It’s this pairing that gives his work its particular tension, where laughter arrives a beat before unease reclaims its ground.
His subversive still lifes, populated with singular bodies arranged in poses borrowed from classical painting, aren’t after cheap provocation, he insists. “I’ve always hated the term ‘freak show’ because everyone is a freak,” Witkin once declared in a speech at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. The photographer selects his models, whom he recruits through classified ads or chance encounters, with an almost clerical rigor, seeking out beings that nature has singled out and elevating them to the rank of pictorial subjects, as in Studio of the Painter (Courbet), Paris, 1990, or The Graces, LA, 1988.
“We’re on earth because we all must overcome our spiritual, mental, and physical; by ‘unselfish’ love, and by the faith that we’re really citizens of another world — of Heaven,” Witkin continued, a man who, early on, had set out to paint God. That faith surfaces in Nature Sees the First Human Death, Mexico, 2017, and in Christ Dismissing The Fashionable Artists From The Temple of Art, NN, 2017, where religion, mythology, and death keep returning without ever becoming mere set dressing.
The marginalized bodies he stages upend received ideas about normalcy, holiness, and representation. Attraction and repulsion hold each other in precarious balance, an equilibrium found again in Imperfect Thirst (NM, 2016) and The Soul Has No Gender (Mexico, 2016), two portraits in which the ambiguity of gender and identity takes on poetic form.
Long since held in the collections of MoMA, the Centre Pompidou and the Met, his photographs have lost none of their capacity to unsettle. Joel-Peter Witkin will also be inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame in 2026, where he will receive the Visionary Award.
That may be the artist’s real feat: building a body of work embraced by institutions while still resisting consensus. In Los Angeles this summer, it still bites.
“Joel-Peter Witkin: Selected Works 1973-2018” runs through September 26, 2026 at the Fahey/Klein Gallery, in Los Angeles.