This interview originally appeared in Musée Magazine’s Issue No. 12 - Controversy

Andrea Blanch: Can you talk about how you came to work with Edward Steichen at 16-years-old?

Joel-Peter Witkin: First, I didn’t “work” with Edward Steichen. I had accrued 30 or 40 slides. I didn’t make black-and-white prints. I couldn’t afford all that. I was just a kid. I had a Kodak Pony with a Kodachrome film. I would go around photographing what I thought I was really beautiful. I edited about 20 of those images, and I just made an appointment through his secretary. I took the box of slides, and said, “I’m presenting these for Mr. Steichen to look at.” After 15 minutes, he came out and asked me to come over to the viewing box. I explained the work the best I could. He chose one for the permanent collection, and also for an exhibition coming up called “Masterpieces from the Museum Collection.” I went there with my twin brother because he had suggested I go see Mr. Steichen. It was a wonderful time, and it gave me the idea that maybe I could spend my life making photographs.

AB: Why did you join the military? How did the experience inform your art?

JPW: I joined because it was my duty, especially during the Cold War. I enlisted to work as a photographer because that’s what I do best. After that, I worked in different studios. I learned by working with different photographers: fashion photographers, medical photographers and I worked in labs. My experience in the service, if I could pin it down, made me appreciate the value and holiness of life because I was trained in the concepts of destroying life.

AB: Your photos are hauntingly potent and morbid. Why the focus on social outcasts, people with unusual physical capabilities or deformities, and mutilated corpses and amputated body parts?

JPW: OK, well, my photographs are not “morbid.” Morbid means unhealthy and deformed. I photograph social outcasts because I want to celebrate their singularity and the strength it takes for them to engage life. An example is a photograph called “Un Santo Oscuro,” a man born in Canada because his mother took thalidomide, which was banned in the United States under the Kennedy administration. He’s born without skin, and without arms or legs. He’s in pain from the moment he was born. As a child, he was a sideshow freak. I had a friend in L.A. who saw him begging on the sidewalk. My friend was overwhelmed. He told me about him on the phone. I got on a plane to L.A., to convince this man to be photographed. I was very struck and emotionally engaged in photographing him. It’s titled “Un Santo Oscuro,” or “The Obscure Saint.” Again, what I want to say is: I don’t work in the world. I work from what the world gives me as far as ideas and emotions.

AB: Why do you choose social outcasts to portray religious, erotic, and perverse themes?

JPW: I don’t photograph “perverse” things, because that means the celebration of perverted intentions. Instead, I celebrate the courage to live, especially the courage to live through the struggles we’ve been given in life. There’s always the negative connotation when people see my work. They think that I’m taking advantage of situations. They think I’m taking advantage of people who are a certain way, and may live lives that they would be frightened of if they had to live them. There’s a lot of mixed baggage out there as far as how my photographs are perceived. That’s normal and natural in the history of art, especially with photography because it’s closer to the reality we all can see and understand. What I want to do is make photographs that are made like no other photographs. That’s the criteria of all art regardless of medium. I’ve been doing this for over 40 years. I have to turn myself inside-out every day. That’s what a “giver” does. I prefer to say “giver,” rather than “artist.” We’re like light meters, in a way. We want to measure what our capacities are to evoke and to emote ideas, which are very powerful and can change lives and heal and share through what we’ve discovered in our love of things. I make all my photographs for myself. I don’t make them for anyone else. My work bounces around different subject matter, especially now in my later age. I’m almost 76. I want to share what I love, and I don’t share it to make money. I have been able to live off my work, but I don’t compromise. I make work sometimes that I don’t even send out to shows, because they will never be sold. I make the work for myself, for my own sense of purpose, and meaning and love.

AB: How does mortality inform your work?

JPW: I photograph death because it’s part of life. In fact, I haven’t photographed death in about 20 years. The last time I photographed death was in the ‘90s. You change, you change your direction, and a lot of things change for you. The motivations may change. You’ve covered a theme and you want to move on. That’s a natural state. Though, as with any other theme, if something came up that was really wonderful that I thought would be important to work with, I would. I’m a visual dramatist, and things that are pretty and beautiful like nature, I appreciate, but I don’t involve my aesthetic life with them. I like horrible things. Things that change us when we see them. I’m not a minimalist; I’m a dramatist. That’s a big factor in the subjects I choose. I make with the purpose to share and to illuminate the possibility that what is being seen is something wonderful and incredibly different. You walk away with a reverence of the subject matter.

AB: There must be a lot of misinterpretations regarding your work. '

JPW: Sure. Because people have different baggage. Especially in this time, when people see something, they see it at face value. When you look back on art history, a person like Max Beckman, James Ensor, even Emile Nolde, were making different forms of painting or, in their case, picturing life. Basically, good things are defeated. Beckman’s famous painting “The Night,” is about the terror, and obviously we’re going through a terror now too, which is very damaging and reflects all the problems of imperialism in the 18th and 19th century. My work is loved by people who have a historical connoisseurship. I work on a level that invites challenge. It’s not “nicey nicey” art. It’s not the art that goes over most people’s sofas in their living room. It’s an art that informs, very much like the art of a writer.

AB: Is your inspiration mostly literary or is it visual, or both?

JPW: I love Giotto. He basically invented Western painting. My deepest intention, if I were doing a better job (maybe I’ll do that in the coming years before I leave this reality) is to make work like Giotto. Regardless of what the subject matter is, even though I have dramatic subject matter, as he did, I want people to think and know that there is something clear, and profound, and immediate happening. Maybe it’s because we’re living in the same time, and we’re sharing those experiences and we’re not removed enough. A lot in the visual arts is conditioned by the art market. You have a disparity of wealth, and a lot of people who have wealth do not have the aesthetic depth to understand. They want trophies. They want what’s in the art books. I make the work because I care, and I have to express that. I’ve done it so long that I see the change in myself. That sustains me. Every morning when I wake up, I’m thinking of making photographs. Every night when I go to bed, I’m thinking of making photographs. This doesn’t mean I’m obsessive. It means the deepest desire of my life is to express myself this way.

AB: How long does it take you to develop, produce, and print a photograph?

JPW: Sometimes it takes me about six months. I always make sketches, and I refine my intention. Then there’s the time it takes to get everything set up, to build the set, and paint the set. I work with one person part-time, who I’ve worked with for over 25 years, and we talk things over, put things together, I suggest what I want, and I rely on her to do what she has to do. I’m usually surprised with what she comes up with. Every object and person in every photograph is a world to me. I process my own film and I print my own work, which I must because the final print is the final and most clear definition of what I wanted to create.

AB: You also manipulate the photographic surface to make it appear aged. Can you speak about this?

JPW: If I really wanted to make old looking photographs, I would make photographs using older processes. There was a magazine called The Daguerreotype Magazine, and there were two images I saw recently. One was a straight black-and-white photograph, and then the same shot taken with a daguerreotype. And the daguerreotype was magnificent. What that meant for me was that one of the first forms of photography, daguerreotype, made the most bland objects look wonderful. That continued on to tintype. When paper come about, platinum and palladium prints, they had their own kind of looks. Unfortunately, in contemporary processes, because I’ve been printing for over 50 years, I’ve seen paper go from being heavy and silver, to being, for economic reasons, thinner and less able to have the rich look I’ve always wanted. For me, the most important and beautiful photographs are the daguerreotype and older methods.

To acknowledge that beauty, I make my work in that manner. Not because I want the photographs to look old, it’s because I want that wonderment of newness in a photographic reality, which I prefer over the dull, modern look of what you have to work with in paper. I have reverence for the prints. I first make a master print, and when I make an edition, the edition must match the master print.

AB: What are the challenges in creating photographs that juxtapose art from different ages in history?

JPW: My photographs reflect something that comes from painting. When I was kid, instead of playing stickball, my brother and I went to museums. We thought we were in houses of beauty and wonder. We learned from the descriptions of paintings, the stories of the past. What I wanted to do with photography is to create narratives that first came about with Western painting. I don’t believe that photography should be only in the moment. Obviously, it’s made in the current moment, but it can be about the past and about the future, just like filmmaking, because it’s the story of life and how life changes. In my work, I like to make photographs with a narrative that comes from the past but is relevant for today.

AB: Your photographs speak to political and social aspects of history and contemporary life. Are you politically active?

JPW: I am. I always have been. I stay informed. I get the New York Times everyday for the last 25 years. I look at BBC on television. NPR on radio. I’m a registered Democrat. I’ve never been so saddened by what’s going on in Washington as now, with the gridlock in Congress, the mediocrity and the stupidity. I have made, in that reference, a photograph called the “Raft of George W. Bush.” It was meant to show the damage that a mediocre Republican president and his Congress and advisors can make on all our lives. We’re still paying the price of that. That particular print is based on Gericault’s “Raft of the Medusa,” where in 1818 the ship called The Medusa went aground, and the captain and his officers took the lifeboats and left the passengers to fend for themselves. What the passengers did was rip the ship apart and created this raft. There was about 200 people on the raft, and there was cannibalism, and horrible things. There was only a few survivors. That was the basis of my making the “Raft of George W. Bush.” The way I depicted it was to show the mediocrity and stupidity of these people not being able to see the results of their actions. Another photograph I made of political failure is the “Capitulation of France.” That was the failure of France not to see the dangers of national socialism.

AB: Why did you decide to live in Albuquerque?

JPW: I came here because I was accepted to the graduate and postgraduate program of photography here. I knew the work of Van Deren Coke, one of the founders of this program and I wanted to get out of New York. I was living in an apartment that was 11 feet wide by 22 feet long for about eight years. I always joke that it was so small that I only had to shave on one side. I moved here on the G.I. Bill, I had three years of it, and that sustained me, but in that time I gained a wife and son. When I began my postgraduate work, I was making photographs in the daytime and working as a busboy in an Italian restaurant. I was 44-yearsold. I worked there for five years. By the 1980’s, I was picked up by a gallery in New York and one in Paris.

AB: What did you take away from your years in art school?

JPW: I went to Cooper Union first, and I knew from the get-go, because I was usually older than the teachers, that art can’t be taught. Either you have the flame of passion or the spark of interest, or you don’t. A fraction of one percent of all graduate students in studio art actually live a life of working that way full time. It’s a hard trip. But I’ve always been impassioned. I’ve always done what I’ve wanted to do. The definition of all artists, actually the definition of all human beings, is to inform yourself of why we’re here, what our purpose in life is, and how to make life better. We have to ask the profound questions. Am I an atheist? Am I a religious believer? Or is life just a crazy conglomeration of planetary movements that made us and made time and space, and we live a life of futility? I’ve tried living that way, and it didn’t work. I don’t like futility or anything nihilistic. I like things that are human and positive. Otherwise, it’s all self-involvement, and it’s all escapist, and it’s all meaningless. I’m not just a spiritual person. I’m a religious person. That’s another reason why I photograph death. I think death is the doorway to eternal life, and we have to die to get there. I believe we are given life to make life better, to find our spirits, and to nurture each other. Then that’s over with, as it will be with me pretty soon. I have maybe 10 or 20 years left. And I’m going to die in the darkroom, printing.