Witkin is a sculptor, painter, draftsman, and photographer. He turned to photography as a means of recording his work. His images are very interesting and he seems to be highly intrigued by the human body .
‘At age six, holding his mothers hand, he claimed to have witnessed an automobile accident where the head of a little girl rolled from one of the overturned cars and stopped at his feet. “I reached down to touch the face, to ask it - but before I did - someone carried me away” Ten years later when he took up the camera, “I wasn’t holding a machine… I was holding HER FACE”
The above statement was extracted from the Joel Peter Witkin (1985) book which has a short statement at the beginning followed by a series of photographs. I found this statement to be very bizarre and rather horrific, however I do feel it matches well with the type of imagery the artist puts out.
I am mostly interested in his work titled ‘Icarus’
It is interesting to see how different people will interpret the same theme or the same character, this is likely to be the most interesting way of portraying Icarus as, in my opinion, without the title, I do not believe I would have been able to decipher what this image was about. Although I feel that way about a lot of Witkin’s work, although it is very interesting and very different.
Below is another image I found on the same website which shows another way of illustrating Icarus as well as another medium as this is an engraved etching rather than a photograph.
This to me is a lot more straight forward and tells the story in a lot more depth without needing a title. However, I really like this way of working without it being extremely direct, it allows the viewers imagination to run a bit more free which I have a theme of doing within my work. I definitely feel that I will use this idea within my work, where I make things a little less straightforward and allow the audience’s minds to wonder.