Witkin BONE HOUSE 1998 Ltd Ed SIGNED Macabre Phot

Title: The Bone House
Author: Joel-Peter Witkin
Publisher: Twin Palms Publishers
Printing Year: 1998 limited edition, signed by the artist

Condition/Details: Bound in olive cloth boards and in its original slipcase, this scarce photographic art reference title is boldly signed on the front endpaper. Witkin (born September 13, 1939, in Brooklyn, New York City) is an American photographer. Witkin claims that his vision and sensibility were initiated by an episode he witnessed when he was just a small child, a car accident that occurred in front of his house in which a little girl was decapitated. He also claims that the difficulties in his family were an influence for his work too. His favourite artist is Giotto, but the most obvious artistic influences on his work are Surrealism, particularly Max Ernst, and Baroque art. His photographic techniques draw on early Daguerreotypes and on the work of E. J. Bellocq. His work often deals with such themes as death, corpses (or pieces of them) and various outsiders such as dwarves, transsexuals, hermaphrodites and physically deformed people. His complex tableaux often recall religious episodes or famous classical paintings. Because of the transgressive nature of the contents of his pictures, his works have been labeled exploitative and have sometimes shocked public opinion. His art was often marginalized because of this challenging aspect. He employs a highly intuitive approach to the physical process of making the photograph, including scratching the negative, bleaching or toning the print, and an actual hands-in-the-chemicals printing technique. This experimentation began after seeing a 19th-century ambrotype of a woman and her ex-lover who had been scratched from the frame. The volume is in excellent condition, only very light shelfwear. The book measures approximately 10.5" x 10.5" and contains 189 pages. Shipping cost (within the U.S.) for this lot will be: $8.50