....GIVE ME YOUR FREAKS.................

"Give me your freaks, your  whores , your harlots, your flunkies , your junkies, give me your starlets......" 

I came across the work of photographer Joel-Peter Witkin whilst we were looking for images for the decor of the rooms in Velvet , a boutique hotel we were completing on Canal Street in Manchester. In the end they were deemed too edgy even for the more liberated clientele in this part of town . so they remained in the book...' Disturbed Genius ' comes to mind . Allegedly he uses real dead bodies and foetuses , bought from his local Mexican morgue with no permission from the families.......the image above apparently is not one of twins - it's one head cut in half......hhhhmmmmm.........

.....I suppose the question here is when does artistic creativity overstep the boundaries of ' taste ' ? Taste is always used by society as a tool for public censorship - to my mind these images are not at all that far from the paintings of Francis Bacon . The medium of photography adds a disquieting sense of realism , particularly with regard to the discipline of black / white ; the disfigurements of the body still retain some semblance of humanity . Spooky , but I keep returning to them , fascinating  / macabre distortions of reality - the same sort of disbelief I suppose when confronted with the freak show at the travelling fair , although these seem to have long since disappeared.

......Very much on the dark side - maybe too dark as illustrations for a hotel , but I have for a long time been intrigued by the creative possibilities of subverting the natural order and using the constructs of a child's dolls house to create an alternate one peopled by freaks ,whores and sideshow carnival queens.............maybe I can reference these images further on down the road , maybe a dolls house , maybe another website for the darkside . We'll see.

To see more of his photos, should you want to , try  http://www.edelmangallery.com/witkin.htm..........and if you want to see how Velvet Hotel turned out then go to http://www.velvetmanchester.com/ and check out the gallery - it's ok to stop there, many people do........and we have just been asked to do another sixteen rooms , which is nice. The building that Velvet occupies on Canal Street will also feature in the work that I am proposing for my upcoming MA course.............more on that , shortly.

In the meantime , those photographs again..........................

Give me your poor ,
Your maladjusted ,
Your sick and your beat
and your sad and your busted.
Give me you has-beens
give me your twisted,
your loners , your losers,
give me your black listed.

Lyrics by Dory Previn