Published to coincide with the current exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, this gorgeously reproduced volume is the most comprehensive survey of Witkin's work to date. From his earliest photographs up to the present, this retrospective tracks the development of his extraordinary and controversial career. Drawing as much from the art of the past--Bosch, Goya, Velásquez, and the Symbolists--as from his own inspiration, Witkin's expression is multi-faceted and rich with meaning. His transcendence of taboo and alchemizing of the grotesque into the beautiful makes his one of the most unique visions of the twentieth century, as this handsome volume illustrates. Second printing now available!

At the age of 6, Joel-Peter Witkin witnessed an automobile accident in which a little girl was decapitated, her head rolling to a stop at his feet. This experience may have had a bearing on his lifelong obsession with the macabre, but does little to prepare the viewer for his bizarre photographs of hermaphrodites and other human grotesqueries. Imagine the fruits of a collaboration between Diane Arbus and Federico Fellini that might be rejected for being a little too extreme. Imagine what Larry Flynt might publish for residents of the Twilight Zone. Two of the milder images: the disembodied, almost skeletal heads of two gnarled old men locked in an intimate kiss; and an obese woman in a cone-shaped mask, breast-feeding an eel.