Joel-Peter Witkin - (1985) Forty Photographs

Forty Photographs is an almost comically restrained title for a book that behaves like a damaged cathedral, anatomical theater and traveling sideshow sharing the same electrical system.

The cover establishes the contradiction immediately. Above the image, Joel-Peter Witkin’s name appears in elegant, stretched lettering, followed by the cool institutional phrase FORTY PHOTOGRAPHS. Beneath it, a reclining body is entangled with cords, drapery and objects that refuse immediate identification. One foot presses toward the edge of the frame. A hand enters from the side. The figure seems suspended somewhere between medical treatment, religious martyrdom, erotic display and stage machinery.

The typography promises a museum catalog. The photograph promises that the museum has developed a fever.

Inside, the design becomes even calmer. Large white pages, small centered titles and generous margins surround the photographs. The book gives each image the visual treatment normally reserved for an acknowledged masterpiece. Nothing is crowded, apologized for or hidden behind sensational captions. The white space does not cleanse the pictures, but it forces them to stand alone. Each one becomes an object of prolonged inspection.

That formal dignity is important because Witkin’s subjects are bodies that conventional culture often either hides or displays cruelly: disabled bodies, fat bodies, intersex bodies, aging bodies, masked bodies, bodies altered by illness, bodies staged near the border between life and death. The photographs do not ask permission to enter polite visual culture. They arrive already wearing the lighting, composition and historical authority of museum art.

The resulting encounter is not comfortable.

Witkin does not photograph his subjects as ordinary people encountered in ordinary life. He converts them into saints, monsters, mythological figures, relics, allegories and actors inside elaborate private ceremonies. This can feel elevating and exploitative at the same time. The person is granted grandeur, but the grandeur belongs partly to the photographer’s theater.

The book never resolves that tension. It keeps tightening it.

“Mother and Child” opens the plate sequence with a corrupted devotional image. A large seated woman occupies the frame while holding a small masked figure. Her own face has been covered by an enormous artificial eye and another apparatus extending from her mouth. The arrangement recalls the countless paintings of the Madonna presenting the infant Christ, but every familiar element has been rerouted.

The mother does not offer a serene face for worship. She has become an optical machine. The child does not radiate innocence. Its mask resembles a small skull or theatrical prop. The surrounding surfaces are scratched, darkened and unstable, as though the photograph survived fire, handling and chemical contamination before entering the book.

The title invites tenderness. The image supplies uncertainty.

Is the child protected, displayed, transformed or consumed by the scene? Is the mother empowered by her fantastic equipment or concealed beneath it? The photograph will not settle into one moral arrangement. It has the structure of an icon without the theological instructions that normally tell the viewer what to feel.

This is one of Witkin’s central methods. He borrows the pose of reverence, then replaces its familiar subject with something respectable culture has refused to revere.

“Hermes” performs a similar disturbance through classical mythology. A nude male body stands in hard light beside a partially draped companion disappearing into shadow. The body is not placed in a natural landscape or clean studio. Darkness swallows the edges, making the figures seem excavated from an underground chamber.

The title offers a god, but the photograph does not present the perfected anatomy of classical sculpture. Flesh remains specific, vulnerable and mortal. The divine name and human body rub against each other until neither remains untouched. The person is raised into mythology, while mythology is dragged back into skin.

“Pygmalion” turns the myth of the artist creating an ideal lover into something closer to puppetry. A small figure sits upon a block, its head concealed inside a striped construction resembling a toy theater, birdhouse or mechanical crown. Strings extend outward. The pose is both playful and trapped.

The original Pygmalion story flatters artistic creation. A man makes an image so perfect that it becomes alive. Witkin’s version makes control impossible to ignore. The created figure is attached to lines. Its identity is covered by the apparatus designed around it. The artist’s dream of making life begins to resemble the collector’s dream of owning it.

Throughout the book, bodies are placed inside frames within frames. They appear beneath arches, inside boxes, before painted curtains, under canopies, within ovals and surrounded by the blackened borders of damaged negatives. These enclosures give the photographs the atmosphere of reliquaries. The subject is not merely pictured. The subject has been installed.

“The Wife of Cain” presents a large nude body in profile, surrounded by masks, ornaments and small figures emerging from darkness. The abdomen dominates the composition, suggesting pregnancy, fertility or abundance, while the surrounding faces turn the scene into a crowded mythological judgment.

The title assigns the woman a relationship before granting her a name. She belongs to Cain, the biblical murderer and exile. Yet the figure’s scale overwhelms the smaller presences surrounding her. She is not visually subordinate. Her body becomes the central landmass around which the rest of the mythology gathers.

Witkin’s photographs repeatedly perform this unstable exchange. A title may classify the subject as wife, mother, oddity, victim or mythological type, while the image gives the body an authority that resists the classification.

The book also places reproductions of older artworks beside Witkin’s photographs. Goya’s portrait of the child Manuel Osorio, Canova’s reclining Pauline Borghese, Rubens’s Helena Fourment and Grant Wood’s “Portrait of Nan” enter the sequence as ancestors, ingredients or evidence.

These comparisons reveal that Witkin is not operating outside art history, throwing filth at an innocent tradition. He is operating from inside it.

European painting is already crowded with exposed bodies, martyrs, executions, monsters, saints, anatomical suffering, mythological violence and eroticized death. Museums have simply placed enough varnish, distance and scholarly language around these images to make their disturbances feel civilized.

Witkin removes that protective distance.

His version of Canova’s reclining Venus retains the broad structure of the classical pose: a body stretched across a couch, head turned, one arm raised. But the living body is heavier, more visibly mortal and surrounded by stained fabric and scarred photographic space. The smooth marble fantasy acquires pores, weight and vulnerability.

The comparison does not merely parody classical beauty. It reveals how narrow the classical ideal has become in the modern imagination. The old sculpture is accepted as timeless beauty partly because stone cannot sweat, age, scar or answer back. Witkin places an actual body into the pose and lets mortality interrupt perfection.

“La Brasserie de Joan Miró” presents another nude figure beneath an arched metallic-looking enclosure. Dark hair covers the eyes. Long forms hang from the chest like exaggerated vessels, instruments or pendulous sculptures. A small object floats above the figure like an escaped organ or punctuation mark.

The image combines Surrealism with the atmosphere of a medical display. Miró’s playful shapes have entered a room where play is no longer innocent. The body becomes both person and arrangement, while the surrounding scratched surface makes the photograph resemble an artifact found at the bottom of a laboratory drawer.

The physical damage is crucial across the entire book.

Witkin scratches, stains and abrades the negative or print surface. The photographs have irregular black borders, streaks, chemical fog and fine lines traveling across bodies. This prevents the camera from pretending to be a transparent witness. Every image announces that it has been handled and altered.

The photograph is not a window.

It is a wounded surface.

That damage creates age instantly. Although the pictures were recent when the catalog appeared, many resemble nineteenth-century plates recovered from an archive of forbidden medical or religious experiments. Time seems to have attacked them before they were born.

This artificial aging can be theatrical, but it also suits the book’s deeper concerns. The bodies are not offered as clean contemporary information. They arrive already entangled with old myths, old prejudices, old categories of beauty and centuries of looking.

“Helena Fourment” makes this art-historical confrontation especially direct. Rubens’s painted figure stands modestly wrapped in fur, one leg exposed, body arranged for aristocratic admiration. Witkin’s Helena occupies a similarly frontal pose but appears against a corroded, cave-like background, wearing a mask and holding fur around her body.

The photograph does not attempt to reproduce Rubens exactly. It behaves like a memory of the painting after passing through a carnival, a hospital and a darkroom.

The masked face is important. In the original portrait, identity and beauty are joined. In Witkin’s version, identity is partially blocked while the body remains exposed. The face becomes costume and defense at once. The viewer is allowed to inspect the flesh but denied ordinary access to the person.

Masks appear constantly throughout the book. Some are theatrical, some medical, some animal-like, some little more than dark coverings over the eyes. They interrupt the expectation that photography reveals identity. The body may be fully exposed while the self remains unavailable.

This reverses the ordinary portrait bargain. Clothing is removed, but intimacy is not guaranteed.

“Choice of Outfits for the Agonies of Mary” pushes the arrangement toward diagram and inventory. A standing nude figure is placed against a surface surrounded by belts, garments, restraints, tools and shapes attached or taped around the body. The title turns suffering into wardrobe selection.

The image resembles a saint’s martyrdom prepared by a costume department.

Religious language and fetish equipment become difficult to separate. Agony is both sacred and staged. The figure’s body is marked, displayed and surrounded by possible instruments, while the composition maintains the rigid frontal order of an instructional chart.

This may be one of the book’s clearest statements about the relationship between ritual and cruelty. Suffering becomes culturally acceptable when given the correct frame. A saint pierced by arrows can hang in a museum. A contemporary body surrounded by restraints produces alarm. The physical facts may be related, but history distributes dignity unevenly.

“Bird of Quevada” encloses a winged, heavy body inside a luminous rectangular border. The wings do not create graceful flight. They appear attached to a body that remains firmly earthbound. Small hanging forms descend beneath the torso, turning the figure into a hybrid of angel, bird, fertility idol and carnival costume.

The image could be comic if it were not so solemnly presented. That uncertainty is another important part of Witkin’s work. The photographs are grotesque, but they are not humorless. Their elaborate props, artificial wings, theatrical breasts and impossible masks frequently approach absurdity.

A winged body that cannot fly contains tragedy and a visual joke at the same time.

The danger is that the viewer’s laughter may repeat the cruelty of the sideshow. The possibility is that laughter breaks the demand that unusual bodies be treated only with solemn pity. The photographs leave both routes open, and the viewer must decide what kind of attention is being brought into the room.

“Melvin Burkhart, Human Oddity” presents a man in profile holding a small hammer near his face. One eye is covered by a dark circular device. The exposed skin, strong arm and deliberate pose give him the authority of someone demonstrating a practiced skill rather than someone passively displayed.

The title uses the historical language of sideshow classification, but the person pictured appears active, concentrated and self-possessed. The tool belongs to him. The performance is his.

This is one of the places where the photograph’s ethics feel more reciprocal. The subject is not simply arranged as an emblem inside Witkin’s fantasy. He brings an existing public persona and physical practice into the image. The photographer still controls the frame, but the performer has not vanished inside it.

Other images are more troubling.

Some bodies appear so thoroughly converted into symbols that their individual presence becomes difficult to recover. Witkin may intend to elevate people who have been excluded from conventional beauty, but elevation can become another form of possession. A person denied ordinary visibility may enter the museum only after being transformed into an angel, monster, saint or erotic apparatus.

The book’s greatness and discomfort occupy the same location.

It sees beauty where many viewers have been trained not to see it. It also seems unable to leave that beauty alone.

Every body must become theater.

The final portrait of Witkin offers a quiet key to the entire collection. He appears wearing a dark mask across his eyes. A small white crucified figure has been attached to the center of the mask, stretching vertically down his forehead and nose. One of his eyes looks outward from beside the tiny body of Christ.

The photographer places himself inside the same symbolic machinery imposed upon his subjects. He does not appear as a neutral observer standing outside the world he constructed. He becomes another masked figure, another face interrupted by religion, another body carrying an emblem.

Yet he remains the one who gets the final portrait.

The book ends with the maker looking back.

Forty Photographs is not simply a collection of shocking pictures from the past. Its real subject is the process by which bodies become images and images acquire authority. A mask can conceal a face while making the body more visible. A classical pose can grant dignity while importing centuries of judgment. A damaged negative can suggest authenticity while announcing manipulation. A museum page can turn discomfort into contemplation.

The pictures repeatedly ask whether beauty is discovered or manufactured, and what happens to the person while that manufacturing takes place.

Witkin’s world is Catholic, theatrical, erotic, medical and carnivalesque. Flesh is never merely flesh. It becomes evidence of sin, grace, mortality, desire, punishment and transformation. Even when a body is still, the photograph surrounds it with too many possible meanings to permit rest.

The most striking thing about the book is not its grotesqueness.

It is its devotion.

These photographs have been planned, staged, printed, damaged and sequenced with obsessive care. Nothing feels casual. The bodies conventional society might dismiss or hide are given elaborate sets, historical references and the dark radiance of religious icons.

But devotion is not innocence.

The same intensity that creates grandeur can turn another person into material. The same art history that grants dignity can bury individuality beneath symbolism. The same camera that reveals a forbidden beauty can control how that beauty is understood.

Forty Photographs remains powerful because it does not allow those contradictions to separate cleanly.

The pictures are compassionate and controlling, reverent and predatory, humorous and severe. They oppose conventional beauty while constructing another demanding aesthetic in its place. They invite the viewer to look at bodies normally excluded from museums, then make the act of looking impossible to regard as neutral.

The book does not ask whether these bodies are beautiful.

It asks what beauty has been doing to bodies all along.