Joel Peter-Witkin

Joel-Peter Witkin is a Jewish-American photographer.   His website claims his images are "not for fairies with frail feelings.  I must say I am in agreement.  Witkin's photography deals with issues of the "othering" people who have heritary conditions ranging from dwarfism to transexuality.  Witkin challenges one to rethink the idea of beauty in those on the margins of society. He places them in staged compositions that mirror famous works of art like Velázquez's Las Meninas shown above.  Note the tribute on the right hand side of the painting to Picasso who painted over 58 recreations of Las Meninas.

Another body of his work deals with death.  Witkin's work is so controversial that he carries out much of his work in Mexico.  He uses real corpses and body parts to stage these photographs.  Far from being detacthed, he claims to love all human beings including the dead criminals who bodies he uses for models. His work is provacative as it challenges the viewer to gaze at what one would normally look away from.  He reports that his interest in death came at an early age when he witnessed an accident where a girl was decapitated.  His twin, Jerome Witkin, is a painter whose work focuses on the Holocaust.  

A collection of photographs by Joel-Peter Witkin
http://www.zonezero.com/exposiciones/fotografos/witkin2/

"I wanted my photographs to be as powerful

as the last thing a

person sees or remembers before death" - Joel-Peter Witkin