Top 14 Quotes & Sayings by Joel-Peter Witkin

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American photographer Joel-Peter Witkin.
Last updated on December 21, 2024.
Joel-Peter Witkin

Joel-Peter Witkin is an American photographer who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His work often deals with themes such as death, corpses, often featuring ornately decorated photographic models, including people with dwarfism, transgender and intersex persons, as well as people living with a range of physical features which Witkin is often praised for presenting in poses which celebrate and honor their physiques in an elevated, artistic manner. Witkin's complex tableaux often recall religious episodes or classical paintings.

I never photograph anything I don't believe in. If I love working with death, it's because even in death I find this power of reality that no sculptor or painter could recreate, not even a Michelangelo or a Da Vinci.
Artists are the people among us who realize creation didn't stop on the sixth day.
Extreme things are like miracles. Nothing is as boring as a person who is just okay. — © Joel-Peter Witkin
Extreme things are like miracles. Nothing is as boring as a person who is just okay.
I wanted my photographs to be as powerful as the last thing a person sees or remembers before death.
I could easily live in a world populated with disjunctive, bizarre things.
My purpose is to acknowledge the wonder of being part of Creation. Though I myself don't create anything, I make from what has been created.
I have consecrated my life to changing matter into spirit with the hope of someday seeing it all.
I have consecrated my life to changing matter into spirit with the hope of one day seeing it all. Seeing in its total form, while wearing the mask, from the distance of death. And there, in the eternal destiny, to seek the face I had before the world was made.
I operate out of confusion, towards clarity.
People who hate what I make hate me, too. They must think I am a demon or some kind of evil sorcerer. 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.
If there is pain in my photographs, it relates to the pain in my own existence.
To me extreme things are like miracles. There is nothing as boring as a person who is just okay. But I could easily live in a world populated with these disjunctive, bizarre things... I operate out of confusion, towards clarity.
I've come to realize that the mark is the primal gesture, the internal connection of the caveman to the cosmos; an impossibility similar to an impulse in an insect's nervous system that it could somehow reduce to dust a steel beam by endlessly crawling over it.
My work would have the impact of my unreality - my doubts.
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