ABSTRACT
The strangeness of Joel-Peter Witkin's pictures owes something to this kind of hollowing out of representational space. In a sense it is Joel-Peter Witkin himself, for the fetus is the being of the subject in a non-symbolic form. Witkin's images, on the other hand, are forged within the psychic space that he constructs and are subordinate to such space. Witkin, similarly, constructs an ego by making marks and makes himself into a picture. The skin of Witkin's pictures is at the same time the skin of Witkin's body. He makes marks on the photographic negative and on the print to pin down the real and allow him to exist. The image retains and conveys the problem; the photographic surface serves as its solution. The anxiety is produced through what Roland Barthes sees as the fundamental parallel between the photograph and the subject. Barthes emphasizes the paradox of the then-there quality of the photograph that exists simultaneously with its here-now quality.
