(no subject)
Next up, we have The Kiss (Le Baiser), New Mexico, 1982 which "is an image of a single autopsied head that’s been sliced in half down the middle, and posed as two separate beings locked in a kiss. There is no mask. Witkin freely allows the dead what expression their countenance assumes. How strange, and yet how comforting. A kiss, being inherently pleasant and associated with joy, disarms the viewer, even as the intellect denies the possibility that this head can feel anything. That each half of the head is achieving what it had in life, wholeness, if only metaphorically, doesn’t diminish the sense that it is so. This fact renders it no less powerful. Of course, there are many other levels of potential meaning, but the most significant event of the image is in how the dead, in the face of reason, can be said to breathe, to communicate." (ZoneZero, Mann) The composition of this work is also simple. The picture frame hold nothing more than the disembodied head in self gratuitos lip lock. The focal point of The Kiss is the meeting point of the face itself, which is dead center. All of the facial features save the eybrows, draw your eye to the focal point, while the grisly scene of the neck remanents keeps you away from that area. This negative was also mutilated, as I imagine the picture was taken on a solid black table, yet there are intresting scratches and scuff across the top and bottom of the work.