BIOGRAFY OF JOEL PETER WITKIN

Joel-Peter Witkin (born September 13, 1939 in Brooklyn, New York) is an American photographer , He Born to a Jewish father and Catholic mother, her parents divorced when he was young because of their religious differences irreconcialiables. He worked as war photographer between 1961 y1964 in the Vietnam War. Later studied sculpture at the Cooper School Of Fine Arts in Brooklyn where he earned a degree in arts in 1974. After the Columbia University granted him a scholarship graduate student at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque where he earned his Master of Fine Arts.

His work often deals with such themes as death, corpses (and sometimes dismembered portions thereof), and various outsiders such as dwarfs, transsexuals, hermaphrodities, and physically deformed people. Witkin's complex tableaux often recall religious episodes or famous classical paintings.