Joel Peter WitkinJoel Peter Witkin

It is certain that an intense beauty emanates from Witkin's work, and that its content, which includes magnified horror, hyperbole, the transcendence of concepts of good and bad taste, as well as an asocial character, endowed at the same time with a pathetic moral resonance, does not only come from its rarity and its extreme attitude, but from the density of certain elaborate and implacable presences of a sure and miraculous cohesion between the staging, the form and the dream. Inside the darkroom, facing the mirror of a mental staging, perhaps for the first time in the history of photography, the world of obsession and phantasmagoria has become reality, the power of metamorphosis transforms into a mournful canticle, and to the beauty of monsters produced by the sleep of reason, to explosive—fixed—beauty, to the aesthetic culture of cruelty, one should add, in the face of Witkin's works, the exaltation of a horrible and sublime beauty, the celebration of an uncomfortable beauty as a means of attaining the ineffable. (Antonio Saura, text in the book)