Witkin Photography Essay

In a bloody, disorganized morgue in Mexico City, Joel-Peter Witkin hovers above the mangled mess of legs and bodies to find the perfect body part to be photographed among an elaborate assortment of fruits and props. The resulting photograph places corpses and cornucopias in the same light. While understanding the artistic attractiveness of Witkin’s work, SFMOMA should first understand the various principles surrounding the First Amendment, obscenity, and social pressures that influence the display of art in such a public area. Before discussing the potential displaying of Witkin’s photographs, we have to understand the principles that are enshrined in the First Amendment and how that protects art.
The First Amendment and subsequent Supreme
These types of uses for photography often put it in odds with other artists who wanted to use photography to distort reality and convert it into a new art form. Both of these differing uses of photography appeared in the case of Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony in 1884. This case was focused on the authorship of two photographs taken of Oscar Wilde. One was the original photograph that had a certain style and an amount of work dedicated to it while the second work was a lithograph that was done by another person using a different medium but the replicated the picture and the staging around Wilde. The Court dealt with authorship and mechanical issues that made it necessary to either consider photography as a method of recording or as a method of expression alongside its original intent. The first issue faced by the Court was its interpretation of the mechanical process involved. Burrow-Giles argued that “a photograph being a reproduction, on paper, of the exact features of some natural object, or of some person, is not a writing of which the producer is the author.” In addition, the Court saw that many of the statutes that were created in order to provide copyright protections failed to include photography simply because it did not exist at the time. Despite this, the Court found that be it a
The issue with authorship is that photography as originally understood was that the photograph captured a direct and unfiltered scene as it occurred in front of the camera. Scenes of crimes and representations of medical procedures predate the photograph but were at its creation, was to be used as a tool. The explicit nature of the photograph speaks to the viewer depending in which the viewing takes place. They encourage the viewer to either take away something from what occurred in front of the camera or read into what they believe the image conveys to them. The duality of this problem creates the question of who is doing the talking to the viewer is it the mechanisms that drive the camera or is it the photographer who puts the camera in places and sets things in front of it to capture pictures of. In the Burrow-Giles decision, the Court sought not to answer the question of photography being an art form but rather if there is an author that works and provides support for the camera to produce the photograph and it concluded that there is. Photography as mentioned in this case gave it a discursive property which is similar to the author in a book or the artist in a painting. Within the case there are still many unanswered questions that the Court did not seek to answer and many of those questions still plague photography today. The failure of the Court to explain