The Big Picture- Art Writings by Lorette C. Luzajic

The Valley of the Shadow of Death: Jerome Witkin and Joel-Peter Witkin

1/21/2026

Siamese Twins, Los Angeles, by Joel-Peter Witkin (USA) 1988

The Valley of the Shadow of Death: Jerome Witkin and Joel-Peter Witkin

When Joel-Peter Witkin read about Yvonne and Yvette, the craniopagus conjoined twins, in the Los Angeles Times, he immediately set out to photograph them.

The McCarther sisters were fused at the top of their heads. Their mother had turned down the chance to surgically separate them after birth because of the risk of one or both dying. The sisters were thus literally inseparable. They did everything together.

To earn money for their medical expenses, the McCarther children worked in sideshow acts for the circus, getting paid to let crowds of curious onlookers gawk at them. Later, they became gospel singers, recording and touring as Yvonne and Yvette: the Siamese Twins. When they passed away in their early forties, they were enrolled together in a nursing program in college.

Photographer Joel-Peter Witkin was always looking for models whose bodies subverted societal norms. The controversial artist pursued people from the margins, the mutilated, medical anomalies, the amputated; people with deformities, people who were damaged, or different; little people; transexual people, people with transgressive sexual identities; as well as the already deceased. Even with a bountiful repertoire of subversive models and severed body parts, the McCarther twins would be a rare camera capture: Witkin had never photographed conjoined twins, and craniopagus conjoinment was the rarest kind of all.

The artist has faced, of course, constant backlash and opposition for his work, which some view as gruesome, sadistic, pornographic, and perverted, and others view as degrading and objectifying to those who are disabled or marginalized.

Witkin has a much different perspective, viewing his practice as both religious, and driven by beauty. He often describes his work as a kind of prayer.

The McCarther sisters consented to pose for him, and the resulting artwork is ethereal and eerie.  Hands entwined, the women wear white lace negligees and white Venetian masks, contrasting against their Black skin. One holds a bird and the other a bouquet of flowers.

The artist recalls the sitting on his Instagram page. “During the shoot the twins very distinct personalities became apparent,” he says. “Yvette on the left was frightened of the bird so she got to hold the flowers while Yvonne was thrilled to hold the bird. Being in the twins’ presence was like being given a gift. They were so sweet and kind and were embracing life making up for lost time. The air was electric.”

Unlike Witkin’s other photographs, there are no severed limbs or bizarre sexual fetishes depicted, no blood or oozing fluids. Even so, the image is still haunting. The photo captures the profound connection between the women.

There’s more to the story in this artwork, moving from what we see to what we don’t see. Joel-Peter Witkin is also a twin, but by 1988 when this work was created, he had been estranged from his identical brother Jerome Witkin, also an artist, for more than two decades.

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In 2014, the Jack Rutberg Gallery in Los Angeles exhibited Twin Visions: Jerome Witkin and Joel-Peter Witkin, showing the work of both brothers together for the first time and ending a 50 year separation between them. The exhibition then travelled to Mexico City.

An audience hungry to make sense of such a dramatic severance would have been disappointed. There were no such explanations offered before, during or after the historical event. All we know is that they amicably drifted apart and went their separate ways. There was no seminal event or argument referenced that triggered their schism.

Perhaps the mystery of it all gives an even more compelling context to the Witkin name. By the time of their reunion, Joel-Peter was a widely collected artist with works exhibited in top tier museums like the Art Institute of Chicago and the Louvre, world famous for his art of darkness. Unbelievably, so was Jerome.

Joel-Peter used a studio to stage scenes and models and a camera to immortalize the strange and the dead, drawing from and recreating the traditions of the old masters. Jerome’s work ran parallel in paintings.

Jerome Witkin, described by the New York Times as a “virtuoso figurative painter” creates narrative art rendered in a style that combines classical realism with gestural abstraction. A recipient of the prestigious Pulitzer travelling fellowship and the Guggenheim fellowship, the artist’s subject matter is social and political, focusing on atrocities like sexual violence, terrorism, death, AIDS, destitution, and destruction. For 23 years, Jerome immersed himself in the darkest recesses of human history, obsessively researching and painting the Holocaust.

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Given the gravitas and morbid imagination inherent in the work of both Witkins, it is perhaps surprising that both brothers are known for their charming, gentle, warm and witty demeanours. Joel-Peter is seen as wildly intelligent, and a more solitary figure, deeply engrossed in his work (“It’s all I have. It’s all I need.”) Yet in contact with others, he is theatrical, gregarious, demonstrative, hilarious. He wears polka-dotted eyeglasses. Jerome is quiet and mild in mannerism, possessing also an extraordinary intelligence, while agreeable and funny. A Facebook page created by his fans and students proclaims, “Anyone who has had the pleasure of taking a class with Professor Jerome Witkin can tell you he is quite easily the most random, amusing, and quotable man to walk the earth.”

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It can safely be said that Jerome Witkin has no contemporary peer. Few figurative painters maintain such a consistent laser focus on human suffering. The influence of Goya is obvious. Jerome is unrelenting in depicting the pain and chaos of the human body and psyche. Fewer still have the skill and vision to carry out what he does, immense, visceral works with supreme technical prowess. The San Francisco Chronicle’s Kenneth Baker wrote, “Witkin’s only peer is Lucian Freud…. Witkin is one of the finest realist painters working today…he stages pictorial dramas that grapple with contemporary historical crises and moral pressures, while offering a lavish physical display of his medium…. ” His unusual style that blends the academic with abstract expressionism is uniquely suited to his work, making for an urban, dystopian sensibility, the impression of souls and their surroundings in demolition and ruin. They are important, unflinching, honest works, created by a master artist.

I’m a more reluctant admirer of Joel-Peter’s work, and yet I find it endlessly compelling. I’m easily drawn to the macabre and see truth and beauty in darkness. But I’m also squeamish about biological and medical realities. Perhaps I am also prudish about penises out of context, especially disembodied ones, and about the more extreme outer limits of human desire and violence in sexuality. I don’t care to see explicit private acts like spread-eagled sodomy by foot, thank you very much. I am fascinated and mesmerized by the artist’s imagination and aesthetic. But I am also shocked and disturbed.

Joel-Peter is also without peer, contemporary or historically. No one has ever plumbed the depths of darkness so fearlessly and elegantly; no one has ever so brazenly embraced death and sex and the extremes of the physical in such a spiritual way. And no one has done this with photography and real live (or real dead) models. Arts writer Marina Isola describes his work in one of his monographs as “Part Hieronymus Bosch, part ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”

And if other photographers like Diane Arbus have bravely photographed the forgotten and dismissed, Joel-Peter’s art is not just capturing and curating what he sees. He is an installation artist first, staging theatrical scenes. Then he is a photographer. The essence of his work takes place after both of these stages, when he prints and paints and scratches and engraves into the images to make them look antiqued and otherworldly.

Joel-Peter seeks his subjects firsthand, approaching real people whom, like the McCarther twins, he learns about through research and newspapers. Driven by the desire to make visible the invisible, he has even placed calls through classified ads:

“Pinheads, dwarfs, giants, hunchbacks, pre-op transsexuals, bearded women, people with tails, horns, wings, reversed hands or feet, anyone born without arms, legs, eyes, breast, genitals, ears, nose, lips. All people with unusually large genitals. All manner of extreme visual perversion. Hermaphrodites and teratoids (alive and dead). Anyone bearing the wounds of Christ.”

He has, of course, been routinely criticized for his fetishistic quest for the most mutilated and marginal of human bodies, for constantly pushing the boundaries: morbid obesity, intersex people, people with no arms, dwarves, the sick, the elderly. His grisly obsessions are not limited to the living. Joel-Peter does not flinch at death, procuring human corpses and body parts from medical institutions and Mexican morgues, using cadavers and severed limbs in still life arrangements. Vanitas, indeed.

If the artist’s search for taboo and bizarre bodies seems precariously close to the freak shows and human zoos of yesteryear, that is not far off the mark at all. It is the literal beginning of Joel-Peter’s art. When they were young men, Jerome took Joel-Peter to the “freak shows” on Coney Island. Jerome himself was working on a painting that incorporated sideshow people and asked Joel-Peter to bring his camera to take pictures. They encountered severely handicapped people, and a man with three legs, and a hermaphrodite. Joel-Peter claims he had his first sexual encounter with the hermaphrodite, that is, someone with both male and female genitalia.

“I wanted to travel with them, but they didn’t need a photographer,” he said. Joel-Peter was deeply moved by the people he encountered in the Coney Island sideshows. Later, he told the Los Angeles Times, “I’ve always been attracted to things that are looked on as ugly or taboo. I don’t want to live feeling that I can’t communicate with someone, because there’s a form of beauty in everything. I’ve been thinking about St. Francis, who had this terrible fear of lepers. One morning he was walking down the road and saw the most grotesque leper and he knew that to get beyond the demise of his own flesh, he had to kiss that leper. And at the instant St. Francis kissed him, the leper turned into Christ.”

If we see his subject matter as salacious, Joel-Peter sees something else entirely. “My work is all about human dignity, caring and compassion... Those who understand what I do appreciate the determination, love, and courage it takes to find wonder and beauty in people who are considered by society to be damaged, unclean, dysfunctional, or wretched.”

As for death, Joel-Peter insists unequivocably in his work and philosophy that death is a part of life, even if most of us prefer to ignore it. Death is actually a mainstay of art history tradition, including the practice of working from the real thing. Chaim Soutine would take dead animals from the butcher shop and hang them on a meat hook in his apartment, painting from the raw material. Theodor Gericault borrowed body parts and corpses from the morgue so that his massive historical narrative painting, The Raft of the Medusa, would be as realistic as possible. The raft was a makeshift lifeboat assembled after the sinking of a naval boat in the early 1800s. Dehydrated and starved, the few survivors on the raft resorted to cannibalism while awaiting rescue. Gericault interviewed two of the survivors as part of his research as well. (Joel-Peter Witkin recreated the Medusa masterpiece in his 2006 political work, The Raft of George W. Bush.)

Death was much more personal, however, than pragmatic for the artist. He has spoken often of a pivotal moment of imprinting when he was a child. “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.”

Later, Joel-Peter enlisted to work as a combat photographer during the war in Vietnam. His training was intense: across American and in Europe, he had to take pictures of all kinds of death. He never went to Vietnam: he was discharged from the army after a suicide attempt.
Much later, in 2024, Joel-Peter made a remarkable claim in a documentary about himself and his twin, Jerome. He said that he had memories from his mother’s womb. (Interestingly, Salvador Dali also claimed intrauterine memory. Most experts consider such claims to be false memories or fraudulent. But others believe that very rarely, some individuals recall their experiences much earlier than the rest of us. It is considered an aspect of  hyperthymesia, or unusually detailed memory processes, and only 100 or so people in the world are considered to have this form of memory.) While I could find very little reference to this online, Joel-Peter said that he and Jerome were actually triplets. Some online sources state that the sister was stillborn. Joel-Peter described in the documentary his recollection of knowing his sister in the womb, and connecting with her at the time of her death. “In that sense, I knew death before I knew life.”
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Jerome, too, has always depicted violence and death. While Joel-Peter views his own work on these themes as joyful, inclusive, and beautiful, Jerome makes no such claims. He believes himself instead a witness to the depravity and pain around him. “I’m a witness. With the paintings and the drawings, maybe they make other people say, ‘There shouldn’t be this. There shouldn’t be this again.’”

On his website, he states, “Since the times we now live in are not pretty and do not have a possible future remedy for those societal troubles, neither are the images I present.”

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How did Jerome’s path so closely mirror Joel-Peter’s? Both men became artists, which is perhaps not surprising. Siblings of any kind who pursue similar careers are common. But it is exceedingly rare for artists to become successful, internationally acclaimed, awarded, and exhibited in premium galleries and museums. Both brothers’ work is deeply rooted in art history, and also in spirituality, albeit with dramatically different expressions of these shared origins and motivations.

The audience’s natural curiosity wants to get to the why of the spirit of their work. All people have a morbid curiosity about human depravity and a desire to make sense of or understand it. But few devote themselves so completely to the task. The dark mysteries of the human heart and the frontiers of the unknown are evergreen fodder in art history and literature: from the Psalms to Picasso’s Guernica, we grapple with evil. Yet few artists fuel their work entirely from this question.

Countless studies of monozygotic twins like Jerome and Joel-Peter confirm fascinating but still little-understood matters of genetic inheritance. Our comprehension of biology is really still in its infancy, and epigenetic explorations are even more mysterious. Nothing about genes is simple: biology is destiny, and yet genes do not guarantee an outcome. We phrase things in terms of “predisposition” or probabilities, or potentialities. The body and all that is inside of it is far more essential to our natures than most of us are willing to acknowledge. While few of us still subscribe to old “blank slate” theories, we usually favour nurture over nature.

Even if something is in our nature, we are not slaves to our biology, we believe. Even the most die-hard materialist holds murderers to account for their choices, though the instinct to kill is clear to anyone paying attention. We might be a fat family, and yet we are sure that a person can modify their predisposition to corpulence. Addiction may be innate to some, yet many outwit their inheritance through practice and grace. Even if higher testosterone and lower intelligence quotients are shared traits among most violent men, most men manage to contain themselves and function in a civilized fashion. A high sex drive is normal for the vast majority of younger people, and yet only a small percentage commit rape or are otherwise unable to contain themselves. Most people, even when experiencing the most intense sexual desires, wait until they are behind closed doors and don’t start humping like dogs beside a public fountain. We have at least some control of our biology, then.

Most of us give much more credence to nurture than nature. We perceive that fat follows poor self-control or emotional factors. We see that many antisocial criminals were badly abused in childhood and understand that early imprinting and trauma contributes in a major way to how we behave. We believe that hate is taught and that most of what we are is learned in some way. After all, even if we possess particular abilities, whether athletic or mathematical or artistic, we must still attend school or apprentice somehow to grow our gifts.

Perhaps our best understanding is that our raw material is given by biology, and then it is impacted by our experiences and pursuits. Everything that happens to us and that we witness and learn interacts with how we are made to become the people that we are.

This fascinating interplay of our environments, biology, families, and chance give us infinite variations of humanity, and we never tire of unpuzzling it. We comb through these mazes constantly- humans are naturally nosy, never tiring of discussing the neighbours and our families and scandalous celebrities. It could even be said that much of the basis of literature, art, religion, and Netflix follow this white rabbit, and that we never do get to the bottom of it all.

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The parallels for Joel-Peter and Jerome make some sense, then, simply because they are twins. They also shared an upbringing: they were not twins separated at birth, but rather in young adulthood when they were already partly formed. It is likely they were born creative, driven, highly intelligent, and curious, and so their paths as artists was long set into motion.
It is just as likely their shared experiences in their formative years contributed to their direction. If Joel-Peter’s seemingly impossible intrauterine memory of their sister’s brief spark is real in any sense, then it is also real for Jerome, even if he doesn’t remember it. Did those mystical moments of connection and untethering impact the way they saw the world?

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If Joel-Peter’s artwork seems at first incomprehensible, even grotesque, it is still inexplicably beautiful and summons profoundly conflicting emotions in the viewer. We are enchanted and disgusted. We can’t look away, and then we cannot unsee it.

One of Joel-Peter’s most famous photographs shows two parts of a man’s head positioned as if in a kiss. He recounts the genesis of this disturbing arrangement as accidental. Working in a medical research lab, he was unaware that a head had been bisected, and when he picked it up, it slipped, ultimately suggesting a man kissing himself.

Joel-Peter emphasizes that while he worked extensively with deceased bodies and parts in his photography, he did not kill or dissect their bodies himself. His material came as is from research labs or morgues. Objects trouve, indeed.

It all goes so far past our collective sense of taboo in so many ways.

But when we hear Joel-Peter’s account of the pivotal childhood moment of trauma, where he witnessed the gruesome death of another innocent child, a young girl tragically beheaded in an automobile accident, it starts to make sense to us. When we learn that he witnessed the dead constantly in preparation for a grisly but necessary job as a war photographer, we feel his wounding. We unravel some of the unfathomable mystery of it, the mystery of death itself, something liminal and luminous, the innocence of being and of the body and psyche at once. Our empathy for the girl and for the artist who witnessed the event when he was just a child give us more context for what he sees and feels and why he seemingly does not hold the same boundaries that we do. And we are able to go where he goes and be inside that space. We can almost shed our own limits in a way that lets us see past our own shock and natural fear and disgust. Perhaps we can even see the way he sees, and lose our repulsion altogether, that death, sex, pain, deformities, and otherwise marginalized bodies are mirrors, after all, not something outside of us. They are us. In light of this story, the artist’s insistence that such depicting such bodies is an act of love, rather than gratuitous or revolting, resonates. We are able to see and feel the truth of what we usually deny.

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Our penchant for nurture and fear of the body as truth, and especially of death and putrefaction and anything that might hint at it, has made death the ultimate taboo. Perhaps our rejection of the body in general stems from this fear: our bodies show us the grisly reality of our finite selves, a decade or nine before the inevitable comes to pass. It may also be that our aversion to the corporal is innate on a biological level: the dying and death itself are both symbolically and literally contagious. We burn or bury our dead and don’t live with them. Some cultures have elaborate ceremonies for the diseased and deceased, most brief and geared toward assuring the longevity of the soul, limiting the contact and communion with the actual body to prescribed rituals. The rest of us dispose quickly of our dead after a few days and entertain any further communion in spirit alone. Too much interest in the corporeal in life is viewed as superfice or vanity, and in death, as depravity and perversion.

We find it traumatic to see death literally, even though most of us will not be able to avoid it. And yet, and yet…we all have an insatiable curiosity about this threshold, if we are honest. And if we are not honest, our obsession is still obvious. The most holy theme in religion is death, and in Christianity, the literal corpse of God is the most sacred of all imagery, connecting the eternal with the most raw fundamentals of the human body. We all tune in to the daily news, where war, murder, and pestilence are universally decreed the most important stories. Millions tune in to murder on television, relentlessly filling ourselves on series like Criminal Minds or serial killer specials. We really can’t look away.

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The crux of my fascination with Joel-Peter’s photographs might be this: I am no different. I also turn tragedy and mortal flesh into sculpture and cinema, only I call it poetry. I dissect people like frogs, expose them in composite revelations in my stories, summon their spirits with the abracadabra of rhyme and simile. I want to know everything. I want to understand what cannot be understood. I have my own reasons. I pursue beauty relentlessly, too, but I know that we are also knit from darkness.  Given the chance, I have volunteered to watch a bullfight, lurk in the shadows of BDSM fetish festivals, attend murder trials for strangers in court. In my wayward youth, I ingested massive doses of various psychedelics to see what I would find at the outer limits of consciousness.

I’m comfortable confessing to a lifelong fascination with death. Like Joel-Peter, I was imprinted with the macabre realities as a young child. There were several incidents that impacted my psyche in this direction: the suicide of a young playmate, poetically ending a young life of torment and sexual abuse by hanging herself from a tree; the suicide of my mom’s brother, broken in front of a train; and the gang rape and murder of a teenage friend, strangled and then burned in an abandoned house by hooligans after marching a protest against capital punishment. Oh, the irony. Later, a teen neighbour boy hanged himself if the basement of the same house I used to babysit in.

I did not witness any of this death in person, but these events had an immeasurable effect on my psyche. Indeed, I have been so closely taunted by the grim reaper, felling acquaintances nearby and intimate beloved with a ferocious frequency and all manner of gruesome, tragic methods that in my less stable days I believed I carried a curse and was some kind of mystical danger to others.

I attribute these experiences for my morbid curiosities, as I have always been drawn to death in literature, art, and television. When I travel, I visit cemeteries and catacombs. I dive headfirst to find out more about any sordid cultural customs and relish anthropology on cannibalism and human sacrifice. I read constantly about murder. I write about death. I feel something of Joel-Peter’s conviction that this subject, in all of its manifestations, is a necessary theme for art, simply because it exists.

On one occasion, I was invited to the morgue by a friend in medical school, a chance I jumped at. It was a terrible and incredible thing to experience: a hands-on session with thirteen cadavers, faces peeled back, stomachs slit open, for students to see inside ourselves. In the name of science, there was a Tupperware-type container filled with human organs preserved in formaldehyde: I held a human brain in my hands. I was filled with emotion and overrun with tears, this rare opportunity to connect physically with the most interior part of a person, the place where a million moments were both programmed and recorded.

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Jerome’s work is much easier to approach, even though it dwells equally on darkness. Unlike his brother, Jerome does not see his art from the standpoint of beauty and love. But he does believe that his art also comes from a place of spirituality and compassion. He enters into the darklands for the purpose of truth and witness. We approach these paintings with a clear understanding that the artist’s motivation is to bring us into communion with victims. Even as the images are unrelenting in their horror, we recognize clearly the messages of social justice and human rights awareness.

Jerome is quoted in Image: Art, Faith, Mystery. “I wish to be remembered as a religious artist who attempted to portray the most intimate range of human feelings and the meetings of the human with life's demons and deities.... Art and the holy are twins. Rembrandt, Kollwitz pray with muddy and bloody hands.” (Kathe Kollwitz was a German artist who painted grief, after losing a son and grandson in the world wars.)

Most of Jerome’s work grapples with intense and harrowing of human experiences, grief, war, oppression, AIDS, 9/11, urban violence. One of his works is called Unseen and Unheard (In Memory of All Victims of Torture (1986), the title pointing again to the idea of the artist as witness. Addiction is a subject he paints often, for example, in his stark portrayal The Crack House (1990). Another recurring theme in his work is homelessness: he spent several months visiting My Father’s Kitchen, a homeless resource centre in Syracuse, New York, sketching marginalized people and talking to them. “I like drawing people,” he said. “They need to be seen.”

And of course, the Holocaust. Jerome spent twenty years researching, processing, and painting themes of the Holocaust, daring to enter into the depths of the depravity and horror to bear witness.

His works draw as much from art history as his brother’s, referencing specific artists, such as his portraits of Van Gogh and Kollwitz, for example, as well as working from the narrative framework of the Old Masters, who used mythology and Biblical stories to contemplate the complicated morality of human history. He also uses styles and aesthetics from the great painters, ancient and modern, blending them to form a recognizable continuum in contemporary form. His vast works are magnified further in size and impact as he frequently uses diptychs, triptychs, and polyptychs of five or more panels in a single work, a common convention in historical religious paintings.

While Jerome’s work fits more easily into our psychological paradigm of right and wrong, assuring the viewer that both they and the artist are on the right side of history, so to speak, we can’t help but question how he got here. He was not the one who witnessed the terrible car crash and decapitation of a young girl, and nor did he photograph the dead as employment. So how did he end up in the same haunted corridors of the mind as his brother?

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Perhaps our why mind can be satisfied by the quote of another artist, Francis Bacon, to whom Jerome has been compared. In his last interview with his friend Francis Giacobetti in 1991, Bacon stated,  “Since the beginning of time, we have had countless examples of human violence even in our very civilized century. We have even created bombs capable of blowing up the planet a thousand times over. An artist instinctively takes all this into account. He can’t do otherwise. I am a painter of the 20th century: during my childhood I lived through the revolutionary Irish movement, Sinn Fein, and the wars, Hiroshima, Hitler, the death camps, and daily violence that I’ve experienced all my life. And after all that they want me to paint bunches of pink flowers…”

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Is it enough? Yes, and also, it’s not enough. We return to our unquenchable curiosity. We are always looking for pieces of the puzzle, for clues to give us more context. The audience is not much different from the artist in this regard: we both want to dig around behind the scenes, to excavate shards and artifacts that can shed light on the human condition. A neon light in the dark blinks out from our minds, glowing: make it make sense!

But can we? Yes and no.

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We can follow the breadcrumbs with this question as our headlight: why does this man, this artist, feel the weight of the world?

Rifling through the detritus of any man’s life, you will find ruins and dried blood. As both brothers remind us constantly through their art, life is full of death.

Jerome and his work’s ongoing struggle with grief and dying owes at least something to the tragedy of losing his 16 year old son, Andrew. Andrew suffered from a rare blood disorder and ultimately died after the hope of healing from a bone marrow transplant. The artist felt the agony of unfair loss firsthand, and perhaps no pain in life is as acute as bearing witness to the suffering of their child.

“…This is going to sound very strange—but when you have one child walking between life and death, you start going on your knees a lot and praying. You simply realize that life is everything and holding onto life is everything,” Jerome told Larry Groff in Painting Perceptions. “I love that child more than anything on the planet. He is just so amazing.”

Yet this painful ordeal happened in 2010, when Jerome was already in the twilight years of a long trajectory as an artist.

He speaks more often of the impact his father had on his psyche. The Witkins, like most of us, had a complicated family. Their father was Jewish and their mother was Catholic, and these religious differences proved impossible to reconcile, ultimately contributing to their divorce when the twins were around four.

Max was a glazier by trade, but had tremendous difficulty making ends meet and keeping a job. He suffered from depression. Mother was volatile, often throwing tantrums and dishes. Max became itinerant, living on the streets, and attempting suicide. Ultimately, he died tragically, beaten to death by hooligans from a Puerto Rican gang. It happened at Coney Island, where both brothers had drawn inspiration for their burgeoning artistic oeuvre.

Max had given Joel-Peter his first camera, a gift that at the very least set the dominoes of fate into motion. Yet the photographer claims that he had little intimacy with his father. Much later, he told the Los Angeles Times, “His death didn’t affect me at all.” It’s a strange declaration of detachment from a man who constantly stresses that his raison d’etre as a visionary is his love, like Christ, for “the least of these.”

Jerome, on the other hand, admits how much his father’s life and death weighed on his mind. He was drawn to the experience of homelessness through his heart for his father’s battle with depression and instability.

“My father was a homeless man,” Jerome told Larry Groff.  “He failed in his business. He failed in two marriages. He tried to commit suicide. He was mugged to death in a park in Brooklyn. You couldn’t find him, and all that stuff. My father was a very sad case of not succeeding in anything. But at the same time, as a homeless man, where homeless people look alike, it’s usually very sad. And they are open to being hurt by other people.”

He was also drawn to learn more about and understand his father’s, and his own, Jewish ancestry through this loss. The painter spent more than two decades studying and painting the depravity of this time of unimaginable horror.

On Syracuse.com, Katherine Rushworth describes Jerome’s monumental five-part painting Entering Darkness (1998-2002).  “In this painting, Witkin provides a brutally frank depiction of the Holocaust as detailed by Dachau nurse Dorothy Wahlstrom in a series of letters — the flames from the ovens, medical experiments on prisoners, starvation and torture are all there.”

Are their shared and divergent experiences enough to explain the Witkin twins’ twin obsessions with the dark side of the moon? Or were they knit this way, their shared DNA encoded with both brilliance and a need to plunder the darkness and examine it, reveal it, through their creative gifts? Both?

Cintra Wilson, writing for Salon Magazine in 2000, said, “True perverts are born, not made…I believe that Joel-Peter Witkin is a true, born pervert.” She means his soul, or aesthetic- she can’t speak to his private sexual predilections, of course.

Perhaps, like the Witkins, I am prone to asking unanswerable questions. It seems reasonable to surmise that everything we are and become is both nature and nurture, a dynamic interplay of predisposition and possibility, and the chance roll of the die along the way. And while inquiring minds want to know, to figure out, to understand why someone does what they do, the origin of the Witkins’ muse must remain, to some extent, in the murky mists of mythology. How we each play out our fates and what we are drawn to remains a conundrum, even as we look for explanations. After all, so many people suffer unspeakable agonies and turn to cutesy crochet animals or ascetic meditation practices. They don’t make horror movies. They don’t even watch them. And others emerge radiant from unbroken homes to run church charities but collect serial killer paraphernalia.

When Musee Magazine’s Andrea Blanch asked Joel-Peter why he dwells on the morbid, he explained that he doesn’t see his work as morbid at all. “I photograph social outcasts because I want to celebrate their singularity and the strength it takes for them to engage life.” He talked about a man he met and photographed who was profoundly disabled because his mother used a drug called thalidomide for morning sickness during pregnancy. The drug caused extreme deformities and was banned. “He’s born without skin, and without arms or legs. He’s in pain from the moment he was born… I had a friend in L.A. who saw him begging on the sidewalk…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.”

Variations of this statement abound in Joel-Peter’s interviews. Reading it brought to mind Jerome’s statement about the homeless people he sketched. “They need to be seen.”
Curiously, Jerome has a painting called Looking: Bob Bersani in the Studio, of a different bald figure without arms, using electronic prosthetics.

My own belief is that we are each made up of our genetic inheritance and our experiential imprints. And also, something more, something intangible and elusive, beyond our understanding. Fate, faith, destiny. I believe some have assignments or callings. They have specific challenges or blessings or burdens or tasks or purposes. Others are exempt those callings; they have their own. I believe some people simply are, and rhyme or reason for what they have to do is not always apparent. I feel like the Witkins had no choice but to bear unflinching witness and create honest, transgressive art from the mysteries of darkness and show it to the rest of us.

**
Time marches on. Today the Witkin twins are 86 years old.

Joel-Peter has said, “I will die in the darkroom, printing.”

**

An interesting twist of fate: Joel-Peter Witkin’s son, Kersen, is a neoexpressionist painter. And Jerome Witkin’s son, Christian, is highly successful fashion photographer.

**

Jerome Witkin created an artwork about twins, too. The Rounds Twins, Before the Camera, depicts two stunning redheaded women in a dressing room, with clothes, wigs, and high heeled shoes scattered around.

Like all of his work, it is an arresting image, fraught with tension and disarray.

Twins appear again in another of his works, perhaps overlooked in the big picture. Division Street: Mad House, Family of Fallen Man is a heartbreaking painting, depicting a chaotic interior scene with a red faced mother pulling viciously at a young girl’s ponytail, arm raised about to strike. A clown’s head and the statue of a saint look down at them from the wall. Witnessing the mayhem, two boys stand in the shadows, helpless, their backs to the viewer and faces hidden, hands of one boy behind his back.

We know the boys in the striped shirts are Jerome and Joel-Peter, because there is a sketch of this scene made after the fact, in 2015, the year after the Witkin’s reunion. Jerome titled it, Joey and Jerry.

**

Another photographer I admire very much is John Paul Caponigro. He says his work is about “the nature of perception and the perception of nature.” He has photographed spectacular images of deserts and of Antarctica, and his work has been collected by top tier institutions like The Smithsonian. Caponigro pays homage to photographer Witkin as an influence on his own work and thinking.

“Witkin’s work challenges me to look at things I turn away from, and my own denial.”

**

Perhaps Caponigro’s insight holds the key to approaching the most difficult, disturbing artwork and the truth they might contain.

What if, rather than seeking a way out, we would instead look for a way in?

Lorette C. Luzajic