Art
His first recorded photographs were of freaks on Coney Island made during the 1950s, giving an early indication of his ambition to challenge the boundaries of acceptable taste. His subject-matter included death, blasphemy, sado-masochism, homoeroticism and physical deformities. He presented an extreme, Gothic, nightmare world, which could be said to border on the pornographic. Balancing this taste for the grotesque was a tendency to mysticism and an aestheticism expressed in ironic reworkings of art-historical and literary themes drawn from Rembrandt, Goya, Rubens and the late 19th-century Symbolists.
Witkin claims that his vision and sensibility were initiated by an episode he witnessed when he was just a small child, a car accident that occurred in front of his house in which a little girl was decapitated.
"It happened on a Sunday when my mother was escorting my twin brother and me down the steps of the tenement where we lived. We were going to church. While walking down the hallway to the entrance of the building, we heard an incredible crash mixed with screaming and cries for help. The accident involved three cars, all with families in them. Somehow, in the confusion, I was no longer holding my mother's hand. At the place where I stood at the curb, I could see something rolling from one of the overturned cars. It stopped at the curb where I stood. It was the head of a little girl. I bent down to touch the face, to speak to it -- but before I could touch it someone carried me away."[1]
He also claims that the difficulties in his family were an influence for his work too. His favourite artist is Giotto, [pic]
Giotto di Bondone (1267-1337), Cappella Scrovegni (Arena Chapel), Padova. No. 31 Scenes from the Life of Christ: 15. The Arrest of Christ (Kiss of Judas). (1304-06) Fresco painting, 200 x 185 cm
[pic]
Giotto di Bondone (1267-1337), Cappella Scrovegni a Padova, Life of Christ, Lamentation (The Mourning of Christ)
but the most obvious artistic...
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