Peter Witkin Quotes & Sayings

I have consecrated my life to changing matter into spirit with the hope of someday seeing it all. — Joel-Peter Witkin

Artists are the people among us who realize creation didn't stop on the sixth day. — Joel-Peter Witkin

If there is pain in my photographs, it relates to the pain in my own existence. — Joel-Peter Witkin

I'd bought a lot of really challenging, cutting-edge Joel-Peter Witkin photographs very early on. There were severed heads and amputated feet and hands in them - gruesome stuff. I had them all around the house, and if someone couldn't relate to it in some artistic way and instead just said "Yuck," then there probably wouldn't have been anywhere for us to go. — Richard Gere

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

My work would have the impact of my unreality - my doubts ... — Joel-Peter Witkin

People who hate what I make hate me, too. They must think I am a demon or some kind of evil sorcerer. Those who understand what I do appreciate the determination, love, and courage it takes to find wonder and beauty in people who are considered by society to be damaged, unclean, dysfunctional, or wretched. — Joel-Peter Witkin

Extreme things are like miracles. Nothing is as boring as a person who is just okay. — Joel-Peter Witkin

I wanted my photographs to be as powerful as the last thing a person sees or remembers before death. — Joel-Peter Witkin

I'm always looking for evidence to support my conjecture that celebrity in Hollywood is sort of like a Joel Peter Witkin photograph: It looks like a big lush banquet table filled with abundance and cornucopias, and then if you look at it closer you see that all the fruit is made of wax and that entree in the middle of the table is actually a dead baby. — Cintra Wilson

I could easily live in a world populated with disjunctive, bizarre things ... — Joel-Peter Witkin

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

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

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