Joel Peter Witkin

WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES BELOW

Joel-Peter Witkin is a modern photographer who evokes 19th-Century style photography and creates surreal, graphic, funny and ironic scenes. Often using dismembered corpses, human "oddities" such as transgendered people, people with deformities and the obese or unusual looking. 

He has been the subject of some controversy and has also attracted something of  a cult following. 

Witkin claims that his vision and sensibility spring from an episode he witnessed as a young child, a car accident 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".[3] But enough writing, Witkins photos speak volumes for themselves: