Joel-Peter Witkin (b.1939) is a major artist whose work shocks but also provokes and questions. In his examination of the human condition, Witkin reinterprets some of the great works of Western art and photographic history in his own terms. Although controversial, his work has been exhibited worldwide and won numerous awards. 
Other artists in this series include: Eugene Atget, Mathew Brady, Wynn Bullock, Julia Margaret Cameron, Joan Fontcuberta, David Goldblatt, Nan Goldin, Graciela Iturbide, Andre Kertesz, Dorothea Lange, Mary Ellen Mark, Joel Meyerowitz, Boris Mikhailov, Lisette Model, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Eadweard Muybridge, Eugene Richards, W. Eugene Smith, Shomei Tomatsu,

Joel-Peter Witkin (Phaidon 55s)

Arts & Photography

Witkin, Joël-peter

Parry, Eugenia

Individual Artists

Phaidon Inc Ltd

Joel-Peter Witkin is one of the most controversial artistsworking today, unsurprising for an artist whose career began photographingsideshow performers at Coney Island as a teenager and who cites hiswitnessing of the decapitation of a child in an accident as an influentialchildhood experience.Witkin's extraordinary visual sensibility producesshocking, yet undeniably compelling tableaux that enact macabre deviantdreams and that find beauty in the grotesque, the different, or theunusual.The thinking Goth's favorite artist', Part Hieronymus Bosch, partTexas Chainsaw Massacre' - many definitions have been offered forthe unique vision of Witkin, but his extraordinary body of work does notallow for any simplistic definition.His photography both explicitlyreferences and continues the tradition of the great artists of Western arthistory such as Bosch, Goya, and Velazquez, referring to the historical andmythological figures and symbols of these artists' paintings.Yet Witkinalso reinterprets the nineteenth-century fascination with the bearded lady,the Siamese twin, the giantess - the circus freak'.In an advertisementfor models, her reveals the extent of his subject matter: Pinheads,dwarfs, giants, hunchbacks, pre-op transsexuals, bearded women, people withtails, wings, reversed hands or feet - hermaphrodites and teratoids (aliveor dead), anyone bearing the wounds of Christ.'He exalts his subjects bysetting them in a fine art context, and offers up still-lifes oftenfeaturing dismembered bodies or delicately posed cadavers to create imagesrich with meaning that force us to examine the human condition.This book is the best introduction to Witkin's work, featuring 55 imagesthat offer the full range of Witkin's subject matter and visual expression. The essay by Eugenia Parry explains Witkin's contribution to art historyand reveals the influences on his work.Each photograph is accompanied bya commentary, written by the author, that enables the reader to understandthe background of each image and reveals extra information about theindividual subjects, making it of interest to readers both new to andalready acquainted with Witkin's body of work.

Joel-Peter Witkin

Phaidon Press

Joel Peter Witkin (0000)

PHAIDON FRANCE

This monumental book surveys the development of postwar American photography, and isolates four major roles of the medium--artistic expression, journalistic documentation, commercial industry, and scientific tool. With extensive essays from a range of scholars, and work from Arbus, Frank, Lange, Friedlander, and many more, this book represents a major reference work of photo history. "All libraries should consider Photography's Multiple Roles."--Library Journal.

Photography's Multiple Roles

Rosenblum, Naomi

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

D.A.P./The Museum of Contemporary Photography

American-born photographer Levinthal has earned national recognition by creating potent, ironic, and sometimes controversial visions using miniature figures and toys as characters in staged tableaux. Since publishing his first major work in 1977 (Hitler Moves East: A Graphic Chronicle, 1941-43), he has worked with Barbie, blackface memorabilia, toy soldiers, and various modeling figures to explore the icons and stereotypes of popular culture. Levinthal executed his series Modern Romance in the mid-1980s. Echoing the paintings of Edward Hopper and film noir, these are scenes of urban life in dreamy neon-lit color and television blues. Levinthal shows us figures lingering on street corners, entering movie theaters, passing through alleys, conversing in diners, and interacting in confined spaces. He also depicts the impersonal landscape of the city: cop cars on the streets, doorways, and murky bedrooms. Levinthal's lovely and vaguely troubling photographs house a tension of possibilities; with details obscured, they speak of solitude, sexual isolation, and urban anxiety. An illuminating essay by Eugenia Parry opens the book, nicely placing this formative series in both a personal and an artistic context. This is serious art, dealing with fascinating ideas. Highly recommended for contemporary art collections of academic and public libraries. Deborah Miller, Minneapolis--Library Journal

David Levinthal: Modern Romance

St. Ann's Press

Linda J Ging, born in 1941 in Hutchinson, Kansas, is an American transcendentalist who has worked in quiet obscurity for nearly thirty years. Her paintings, rooted in the immense spaces and changing skies of rural Kansas, are not landscapes. They are not about things. They are dust, astral dust. 
Linda Ging rigorously eradicates all suggestions of place, material existence, and especially her own presence. She brushes on color washes in scores of translucent layers with a touch so light as to seem uncanny. She never arrives at opacity. Some suspect the use of an airbrush. The suggestion is as preposterous to her as using the wings of insects.
Her mature work pushes abstraction beyond Abstract Expressionism's cult of personality, beyond the geometry of Rothko's shimmering squares. Her selfless art, "beyond is and is not," as the poet Rumi wrote, explores the gorgeous mysteries of nothingness, the rewards of uncertainty, the marvelous fullness of the Void. 
Linda Ging's paintings are loved and collected worldwide. 
This first publication of her work reproduces in color more than forty of her mature pieces. It includes an essay by Eugenia Parry and a foreword by Stuart Ashman.

Linda J Ging: Paintings

History & Criticism

Fresco Fine Art Publications, LLC

Wind showcases the most recent work of the widely acclaimed and exhibited Korean photographer Jungjin Lee. Known for her laborious and textured photographic process, Lee brushes liquid emulsion onto the surface of handmade rice paper, endowing her images with a uniquely painterly effect. Wind captures the ethereal quality of the element in a series of landscapes dominated by windswept expanses and atmospherically foreboding cloud formations--panoramas that reveal an adventurous spirit, yet resist casual entry. Manmade objects, such as a dilapidated school bus or windblown prayer flags, all appear deeply inscribed by an invisible hand that runs through the entire corpus of this volume, leaving evidence of its handiwork on all surfaces. Lee's landscapes are imbued with an elemental vastness that strikes us as atonce powerful and serene.

Jungjin Lee: Wind

Goldberg, Vicki

Photography & Video

Aperture/Sepia

Family man, optician, avid reader and photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard created and explored a fantasy world of dolls and masks, in which his family and friends played the central roles on an ever-changing stage. His monograph, The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater, published posthumously in 1974, recorded his wife and family posed in various disquieting settings, wearing masks and holding dolls and evoking a penetrating emotional and psychological landscape. The book won his work critical acclaim and has been hugely influential in the intervening decades. Dolls and Masks opens the doors on the decade of rich experimentation that immediately preceded the production of his final opus, The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater. Published to coincide with an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, this handsome book presents more than 70 never-before-seen works from the Meatyard Archive, greatly expanding our understanding of Meatyard's elusive and captivating genius. Writer and historian Eugenia Parry and curator Elizabeth Siegel contribute essays that set the stage for this foray into the unknown work of one of the last century's most intriguing photographers. Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925-1972) attended Williams College as part of the Navy's V12 program in World War II. Following the war, he married, became a licensed optician and moved to Lexington, Kentucky. When the first of his three children was born, Meatyard bought a camera to make pictures of the baby. Photography quickly became a consuming interest. He joined the Lexington Camera Club, where he met Van Deren Coke, under whose encouragement he soon developed into a powerfully original photographer. Meatyard's work is housed at the Museum of Modern Art, George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, Smithsonian Institution and many other important collections.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard

Siegel, Elizabeth

Radius Books

Apôtre de la "désagréable beauté" et de l'anormalité, sans cesse à la recherche de personnages d'exception, difformes ou monstrueux, Joel-Peter Witkin donne à des images qui pourraient n'être que provocatrices une dimension d'icônes laïques, d'allégories sacrificielles. C'est Soutine ou Bataille qu'il faut citer pour trouver des similitudes dans l'art de sublimer l'horreur. L'oeuvre de Witkin est une danse de mort, somptueusement mise en scène par le plus visionnaire des photographes. Introduction de Eugenia Parry 64 photographies en couleur notices biographique et bibliographique\nFrom the Back Cover\nApôtre de la "désagréable beauté" et de l'anormalité, sans cesse à la recherche de personnages d'exception, difformes ou monstrueux, Joel-Peter Witkin donne à des images qui pourraient n'être que provocatrices une dimension d'icônes laïques, d'allégories sacrificielles. C'est Soutine ou Bataille qu'il faut citer pour trouver des similitudes dans l'art de sublimer l'horreur. L'oeuvre de Witkin est une danse de mort, somptueusement mise en scène par le plus visionnaire des photographes. Introduction de Eugenia Parry 64 photographies en couleur notices biographique et bibliographique

Joel-Peter Witkin: Photo Poche n° 49

Actes-sud

Bill Jacobson's photographs resist easy identification. They are blurred, diffuse and atmospheric, depicting only the vague outlines of urban scenes, rural landscapes and human figures. Enveloped by a dark or light mist, these shadowy forms refute the premise that photographs capture reality and serve as a reliable aid to memory. Instead, his photographs are images of vague recollections and forgotten experiences. They speak of mortality and dissolution, not only of the body but of its surroundings as well. His latest works, presented here, are related to two earlier series from the 1990s which were direct responses to the AIDS epidemic, but are more open-ended and universal in spirit.

Bill Jacobson: Photographs

Hatje Cantz Publishers

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Books by Parry, Eugenia