“Witkin and Witkin” -The wit of it all [MOVIE REVIEW]
Joel Peter witkin and one of his favorite models in “Witkin and Witkin.” Photo courtesy of Indiepix Films. Trisha Ziff, no stranger to the art world, should gain more fame with the release of her outstanding documentary on Joel and Jerome Witkin entitled eponymously “Witkin and Witkin.” I have known of Joel-Peter Witkin’s work for almost 30 years because a close friend collected his photography. It was the most graphically bizarre work I had ever seen, beyond, in many ways, that of Robert Mapplethorpe. A particular target of Jesse Helms when giving reasons why the NEA should be defunded, Joel loves the unloved and the physically abnormal. Some of his most famous, or infamous, photos are of beautiful naked transsexual women who have not completed the final surgical procedure, vaginoplasty. Usually staged dramatically, some on crucifixes, others in the guise of Renaissance Madonnas, they are haunting and memorable. Joel focuses on those at the margins of society much like Diane Arbus did. Arbus’s subjects were from the edge of an unaccepting society that tended to underscore how and why they didn’t fit in. Her camera found the humanity in the men, women, and children that they…
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