Joel-Peter Witkin Quotes

#1. I wanted my photographs to be as powerful as the last thing a person sees or remembers before death.

Joel-Peter Witkin

#2. If there is pain in my photographs, it relates to the pain in my own existence.

Joel-Peter Witkin

#3. 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.

Joel-Peter Witkin

#4. Artists are the people among us who realize creation didn't stop on the sixth day.

Joel-Peter Witkin

#5. 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.

Joel-Peter Witkin

#6. I could easily live in a world populated with disjunctive, bizarre things ...

Joel-Peter Witkin

#7. I have consecrated my life to changing matter into spirit with the hope of someday seeing it all.

Joel-Peter Witkin

#8. Extreme things are like miracles. Nothing is as boring as a person who is just okay.

Joel-Peter Witkin

#9. 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.

Joel-Peter Witkin

#10. 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.

Joel-Peter Witkin

#11. My work would have the impact of my unreality - my doubts ...

Joel-Peter Witkin