Abstract
Joel-Peter Witkin’s Humor and Fear (1999) stages a young amputee model in a theatrical, pseudo-antique scene. The image embodies seemingly disparate genres for representing the body: artistic, theatrical, medical, and freakish. She is posed nude on a pedestal or chest that resembles a Classical sarcophagus with its figurative sculptural program, and leans on one arm and hip, with her other arm raised to display a small bowl. Her posture is unnatural for a portrait subject, as her body becomes embedded in an allegorical program, like the ones carved into her pedestal. Surrounded by vegetal props that resemble a Greek entablature motif, the model is framed in a photographic vignette that creates a proscenium arch—the symbol of Greek theater. This background, printed in painterly, heavy inks, contrasts with the glaring whites of her marble-like skin and sets off her illuminated body as a decorative sculptural, architectural, or still life object. The marks Witkin has applied to the plate and the sepia washes over the print give the photograph an additional antique aesthetic. The model resembles a generic art historical nude, yet the photograph emphasizes the tangible materiality of her graphically naked, explicit body. The photographic medium highlights the texture of her flesh and pubic hair, which surpasses the illusion of marble and her possible symbolic connotations; with scientific accuracy, the photograph emphasizes the tactility of the scene. The folds in her skin pair visually with the folds in an animated drapery that surrounds her body, climbs over one arm, and seems to have a life of its own, again contrasting with and highlighting the static, inanimate pose of the model (Fig. 4.1).
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Notes
- 1.
This photograph can be found in Witkin & Witkin: A Photographer, A Painter (Mexico: 2016) 2007, p. 77 and in “Conclusion: Staring Back and Forth,” in The Disabled Body in Contemporary Art. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 141-144; Witkin & Witkin (Trisha Ziff, dir. 2017); “The Model: Ann,” Witkin & Witkin: A Photographer, A Painter (Mexico: 2016), 75–83. A shorter version of the essay can be found on my website. Modeling for Joel-Peter Witkin: https://www.annmg.com/essays; The blog post in which I describe attending a 2018 Documentary Film Festival in Washington DC to view the film Witkin & Witkin:
https://www.annmg.com/single-post/2018/09/21/for-joel-trisha-and-all-the-remarkable-women (accessed on 9.12.2023).
- 2.
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Seeing the Disabled: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography,” in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, Paul K. Longmore and Laurie Umansky, ed., 335–222 (New York: New York University Press, 2000).
- 3.
Eugenia Parry, Joel-Peter Witkin (London; New York: Phaidon, 2001), 115.
- 4.
Quoted from a discussion in September 2004 with Sarah Hasted, Director of Photography at the Ricco-Maresca Gallery, now Director of the Hasted-Hunt Gallery, New York.
- 5.
My summaries of other critics’ analyses of Witkin’s work are drawn from the following sources: Max Kozloff, “Contention Between Two Critics About A Disagreeable Beauty,” Artforum 22 (Feb. 1984): 45–53; Cynthia Chris, “Witkin’s Others,” Exposure 26, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 16–26, 23–24; Marlene Schnelle-Schneyder, “Joel-Peter Witkin: Dream Work in Staged Pictures – The Demythologized World of Joel-Peter Witkin,” Camera Austria 35 (1990): 30–36; Brooks Adams, “Grotesque Photography,” Print Collector’s Newsletter 21, no. 6 (Jan.–Feb. 1991): 206–210; Max Kozloff, “Stilled Lives,” ArtForum 31 (Summer 1993): 75–79; R.H. Cravens, “Joel-Peter Witkin,” Aperture no. 133 (Fall 1993); Germano Celant, Joel-Peter Witkin (Milan: Edizioni Charta, 1995); Maria Christina Villaseñor, “The Witkin Carnival,” Performing Arts Journal 18, no. 2 (May 1996): 77–82; Eleanor Heartney, “Postmodern Heretics,” Art in America 85, no. 2 (Feb. 1997): 32–35, 37; Ivan Berry, interviewer, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: Joel-Peter Witkin,” Art Papers 22, no. 6 (Nov.–Dec. 1998): 34–39; Rachelle Dermer, “Joel-Peter Witkin and Dr. Stanley B. Burns: A Language of Body Parts,” History of Photography 23, no. 3 (Autumn 1999): 245-53, 248; Peter Schwenger, “Corpsing the Image,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 395–413; and Brett Wood, “Photo Mortis: Resurrecting Photographs of Crime and Death,” Art Papers 24, no. 2 (March–April 2000): 18–23.
- 6.
See, for example, Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Richard Howard, trans. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981); John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Education, 1988); and Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, c1991).
- 7.
Witkin edited a volume of Burns’ collection: Masterpieces of Medical Photography: Selections from the Burns Archive, ed. Joel-Peter Witkin, captions by Stanley B. Burns (Pasadena, CA: Twelvetrees Press, 1987) and curated the exhibit, from which the following catalogue was published: Witkin, Joel-Peter, ed., Harms Way: Lust & Madness, Murder & Mayhem: A Book of Photographs (Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms Publishers, 1994).
- 8.
Witkin, ed. (1987) and (1994).
- 9.
Ambroise Paré, On Monsters and Marvels, transl. by Janis L. Pallister (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982; 1840).
- 10.
See Leslie Fiedler, Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1978). Like Paré, Fiedler organizes his book according to freakish “types” or corporealities.
- 11.
George M. Gould and Walter L. Pyle, Anomalies and curiosities of medicine: being an encyclopedic collection of rare and extraordinary cases, and of the most striking instances of abnormality in all branches of medicine and surgery, derived from an exhaustive research of medical literature from its origin to the present day, abstracted, classified, annotated, and indexed (New York, Julian Press 1956; 1896).
- 12.
One particularly illuminating example in Gould and Pyle is the section titled “Physiological and Functional Anomalies,” which includes (among random others): anomalies of body fluids, fetishism, juggling, fire worship, ventriloquism, strong men (modern Hercules), chronic opium eating, divers, runners, spontaneous combustion of the body, contortionism, acrobats, tight rope walkers, morbid desire for pain, bulimia, death from joy and laughter (used as arguments for rational, unemotional behavior), cannibals, artificial manufacture of “wild boys,” magnetic, phosphorescent, and electric anomalies, deafness (Helen Keller included), blindness, and the “extraordinary compensation” of other senses in affect.
- 13.
For many examples of the themes and functions of anatomical and surgical displays in art history, see Martin Kemp, Marina Wallace, Hayward Gallery, and Anderson-Riggins Memorial Fund. Spectacular Bodies: The Art and Science of the Human Body from Leonardo to Now (London, Hayward Gallery; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000). In her discussion of dissection and art, Barbara Maria Stafford writes that the Renaissance flowering of artistic and scientific studies of anatomy and Classical philosophies reached a zenith in the Enlightenment and emerged in art theory and practices, including physiognomic studies, portraiture, and still life. In addition, dissection practices and metaphors, according to Stafford, informed visual displays of bodies in medical and freak venues and other forms of vernacular culture. Anatomy lessons, dissection, and sketching from live and wax models and from medical illustrations were prominent in academic painting instruction since the Renaissance. Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 47–129. In addition, Lynda Nead has argued that such histories of art training initially focused on medical displays of male bodies and shifted to females in the nineteenth century. Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality (London; New York: Routledge, 1992).
- 14.
Stafford, 107–108.
- 15.
Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (London and New York: Verso, 1995).
- 16.
Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1998): 3–64.
- 17.
The Burns Archive (1987).
- 18.
Daniel M. Fox and Christopher Lawrence, Photographing Medicine: Images and Power in Britain and America Since 1840 (New York; Westport, CT; London: Greenwood Press, 1988), 54. See also Stanley B. Burns, MD, Early Medical Photography in America (1939-1883) (New York: Burns Archive, 1983).
- 19.
Burns (1983) writes that the higher the social status of the patient, the more likely they were draped, and patients who were photographed over time to document their treatments were generally clothed in continuously improving styles to indicate their “progress” of rehabilitation or cure. In relation, military officers were most often photographed in their uniforms to indicate rank, whereas enlisted men wore close to nothing in their medical photographs, 1262.
- 20.
Such differentiations between the erotic versus the pornographic are made, for example, by Barthes.
- 21.
Gilman argues that photography constructs and informs histories of mental illness, disability, asylums, institutionalization, and evolution. See Sander L. Gilman, Picturing Health and Illness: Images of Identity and Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, c1995).
- 22.
Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
- 23.
Tagg.
- 24.
David Lomas, “Body languages: Kahlo and medical imagery,” in Kathleen Adler and Marcia R. Pointon, eds., The Body Imaged: The Human Form and Visual Culture since the Renaissance, 5–19 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
- 25.
See: https://www.history.com/news/frida-kahlo-bus-accident-art (accessed on 9.13.2023).
- 26.
Georges Bataille, “The Big Toe,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 20–23.
- 27.
Stanley B. Burns, M.D., A Morning’s Work: Medical Photographs from the Burns Archive & Collection 1843-1939 (Hong Kong: Twin Palms Publishers, 1998).
- 28.
For examples: Kozloff, Chris, and Villaseñor.
- 29.
Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993).
- 30.
Phelan (1993).
- 31.
Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 220.
- 32.
See Marie-Hélène Huet, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993) and Paré.
- 33.
Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books; Cambridge, MA: Distributed by the MIT Press, 1998). Also see Fiedler; Bogdan; Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, ed., Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York: New York University Press, 1996); and Rachel Adams, Sideshow USA: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
- 34.
“Staring Back,” in Millett-Gallant (2010), 141–144.
- 35.
“Infinitas Gracias”, editions du Seuil, France, 2004, p. 162.
- 36.
Ann Millett-Gallant, Remembering: Putting Mind and Body Back Together Following Traumatic Brain Injury (Chapel Hill: Wisdom House Books, 2017).
- 37.
Hitler Posing with the Anti-Christ, 1937 toned gelatin silver print, oil paint, and encaustic (2015).
Witkin & Witkin (2016), 74.
- 38.
Witkin & Witkin (Trisha Ziff, dir. 2017), see: http://212berlin.com/project/witkin-witkin-movie (accessed on 9.13.2023). The film made its eastern US premiere at The American Film Institute’s 2018 annual documentary festival June 13–17 and was screened at the National Gallery, where I viewed and spoke on a panel discussion about it. I wrote a 2018 blog about my experiences at the festival: https://www.annmg.com/single-post/2018/09/21/for-joel-trisha-and-all-the-remarkable-women (accessed on 9/13/2023).
- 39.
Ann Millett-Gallant, “The Model,” in Trisha Ziff, ed. Witkin & Witkin: A Photographer, A Painter (Mexico: 2016) 2007, 75–82.
- 40.
John D. Stoeckle and George Abbott White, Plain Pictures of Plain Doctoring: Vernacular Expression in New Deal Medicine and Photography: 80 photographs from the Farm Security Administration (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, c1985), 111.
- 41.
Portions of this chapter have been reprinted, with permission, from: Ann Millett, “Performing Amputation: The Photographs of Joel-Peter Witkin,” in Text and Performance Quarterly, Volume 28 Issue 1, 8 (January 2008), 8–42. (http://www.informaworld.com).
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Millett-Gallant, A. (2024). Performing Amputation. In: The Disabled Body in Contemporary Art. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48251-9_4
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