First edition, first printing. Hardcover. Fine cloth, with dust jacket. Edited and with an introduction by Joel-Peter Witkin. Captions and Afterword by Stanley B. Burns, M.D. Unpaginated. 40 four-color plates on uncoated paper. Selection of photographs from the "Burns Archive," which contains over 700,000 vintage prints including the world's largest collection of early medical photographs. 12 1/4 x 9 1/2 inches. This first edition was limited to 3000 hardbound copies.

Masterpieces of Medical Photography: Selections from the Burns Archive

Joel-Peter Witkin

Stanley B. Burns

History

Twelvetrees Press

The image exudes torture and pain, but this is not the extent of the photographer's ambition for it. He envisions a huge scale; the print will be the largest he can make because he has mapped a grand conception, and, after more than forty years as a photographer, arrived at a place of understanding more lucid than he has ever before achieved. With his vanitas he establishes an erotic territory of majestic sacrifice and sacrament, the meaning of which, for him, lies somewhere between the unspeakable suffering of the crucified Christ and that of the Jews under Hitler.

The Bone House

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

Twin Palms Publishers

Mark Cohen first came to the attention of the photography world in 1973 with a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. This iconic show proved to the art world that Cohen was the heir apparent to the explosive street photography of the 60s. Now, after more than thirty years, Cohen’s complex and influential body of work is presented for the first time in Grim Street, an astonishing collection of Americana as original and effective as the work of Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, or Weegee. Cohen’s photography confronts the viewer with a startling beauty, rapidly shifting from rough and confrontational to quiet, respectful, and serene. In Grim Street, filled with what Cohen calls “grab shots,” you can easily imagine the photographer guilefully patrolling the streets of Wilkes-Barre, the Pennsylvania mine-town he calls home. His camera, often prefocused and shot from the hip, scrolls around its subjects searching for tidbits of delectable detail. Then suddenly thrusting out towards its subjects, a strobe bursts, capturing a violently cropped spot of stockinged legs creeping around a corner, or a woman’s bared teeth and stretched lips. In these images emerges a cluttered world of visceral, sexualized encounters with the human body. The photographs are equally fascinating for the inconsistent reaction of their subjects. In one shot, a group of young girls hide their faces with their coats and cower against a brick wall, desperately searching for any protection from Cohen’s camera. Another shot brandishes a dapper young man, hair greased and comb quickly pulled out for the glamour shot. But just when you think that you can’t see the photographs for all the noise, Cohen’s camera stands back in meditation, displaying sensitive compositions of the gardens of Wilkes-Barre and the small town’s residents engaging in their daily comforts. One of the more complex bodies of street photography around, Cohen’s work will open your eyes as wide as they can go and keep you flipping the pages for years to come. “Cohen’s black-and-white photos…are deliberately disconcerting, almost vulgar….Heads are cropped out of the frame; truncated hands, legs, and arms loom monstrously into view; perspective warps. Cohen wasn’t alone in his harsh, comic view of down-home America, but his in-your-face take and fragmentary results were jarringly unique, and much imitated.” —Vince Aletti, The Village Voice

Grim Street

Anne Wilkes Tucker

Mark Cohen

Thomas Southall

powerHouse Books

This forty-ninth installment of the venerable Photo Poche series of photography monographs is a concise survey of the boundary pushing work of Joel-Peter Witkin.

Photo Poche, No. 49: Joel-Peter Witkin

Reference

Eugenia Parry-Janis

Foreign Language Study & Reference

Centre National de La Photographie

Germano Celant

Charta, Castello di Rivoli and Solomon R Guggenheim Museum

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Books by Joel-Peter Witkin