Joel-Peter Witkin. Heaven or Hell

Enfer ou ciel

Joel-Peter Witkin

The singular, disconcerting oeuvre of American photographer Joel-Peter Witkin is haunted by the certainty of a real divine presence. Choosing his subjects among people on the fringes of society or indulging in extreme practices (transsexuals, sadomasochists, the mentally ill or physically disabled), Witkin rises above the anecdotal and the spectacular. His photographs put him in the lineage of Sade, Bataille and the Christian mystics: through the glory and misery of the flesh they express a metaphysical, philosophical-even mystic-disquiet, which is rooted in the artist's immense knowledge of art. So a completely new, fertile dialogue takes shape here between his photographs and fifty precious prints from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the work of Dürer, Rembrandt, Goya, Rops, Picasso, Ensor.