Sovvertire gli stereotipi, sabotare l’identità: I ritratti di Joel Peter Witkin tra fotografia e teatro

The paper focuses on the complex construction of the person's identity operated by the photographic practices. In particular it highlights the deconstruction of the photography of the 19th century operated by the contemporary artist Joel Peter Witkin. One of the first uses of the photography was the documentation of patients as a way to legitimate modern medical discourses on the body. Joel Peter Witkin takes into account the numerous strategies used in that period in order to subvert their original functions and show the nature of the images as a product always of an authority. The aim of his work is to stress photography’s role in the creation of stereotypes and categories such as “disability”, “deviant” and “extraordinary”. The main hypothesis is that photography, in becoming a device for building and validating the body's taxonomies, has actually endorsed and structured its own linguistic and operational body.