Joel-Peter Witkin: Broken World

For more than five decades, Joel-Peter Witkin has been one of the most influential artists pushing photography to the forefront of the visual arts. His staged images and meticulous work with the material of the print blur the boundaries between photography and painting, between a document and a scene. This selection of works from the years 2010–2025 represents a late synthesis of this approach – a thoughtful intersection of genres that leads not to a quick impression but to a slow reading of the image as an event. Witkin’s work features recurring motifs of vanitas, metamorphosis, and the clash between the sacred and the profane. The text in the image acts as a director’s note, the humour brings the scene to life, and the deliberate misalignment of the composition arrests the gaze and returns it to the core of the action. The beauty here consists not in style but in courage – it is born of the conflict between order and matter, requiring time, a tolerance of ambivalence, and a disciplined gaze. Interventions in the negatives, collage, toning, and scratches transform the time of creation into the time of reading; here light functions as a tool which draws out of the darkness even those things that we would rather overlook. Witkin’s late works alternate between monumental staged compositions and intimate formats, but the method remains consistent: A precise structure keeps the image in tension so that it does not slip into showiness or moralising. The exhibition also highlights Witkin’s drawings, which act as a score for the composition and as an intimate counterpart to the photographs. They reveal gestures, explore the relationships between lines and shapes, and show how an image is born even before its exposure. The drawings thus offer a glimpse into the artist’s working discipline and expand the meaning of the photographic scenes. The exhibition Broken World offers the experience of slowing down, which restores the image’s dignity. It reminds us of Witkin’s exceptional position among the art of recent decades and shows us why his work continues to shape the way we think about the body, memory, and the meaning of images.

Curator: Otto M. Urban

Joel-Peter Witkin (born in 1939 in Brooklyn, New York) is an American photographer living in Albuquerque whose oeuvre is one of the most striking examples of staged photography in the 20th and 21st centuries. He is well known for his carefully composed scenes that combine themes such as death, faith, corporeality and sexuality with allusions to the history of painting and religious iconography. Also characteristic of his work are his experiments with the photographic process, scratching and tinting the negatives or manually intervening in the positives to intensify his unique aesthetic. While controversial, Witkin’s photographs are also appreciated for their blend of beauty and taboo, lyricism and brutality. They are featured in the collections of major institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the National Gallery in Washington, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Pompidou Centre in Paris. He has had solo exhibitions in venues that include Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, Arizona State University Art Museum, and MoMA in New York.