Germano Celant, who was curator of contemporary art at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1995 when Witkin had his retrospective, explains the photographer's importance with the following:

The formless and the deformed, the base and the terrifying must be brought back into the light. In this sense Witkin works with Arbus and Robert Mapplethorpe to ensure that the notion of "cruelty" is no longer hostile but is transformed into a cognitive nucleus purged of its dark and negative connotations.

Despite all controversies, and despite the fact that Witkin's photographs came to the art world at a time when works of photography were rarely permitted the mantle of "high art," Witkin prints wormed their ways into the permanent collections of the world's foremost museums, among others, the Bibliothhque Nationale in Paris, the San Francisco MoMA, Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum, the New York MoMA, the Whitney.

Witkin's greatest artistic accomplishment may be the deal he was able to work out with a hospital morgue in Mexico City, which allowed him to sift through its daily supply of anonymous corpses picked up from the streets and cavalierly manipulate them into "art." "I am no longer the helpless observer," explains Witkin, "but the objectifier who chooses to share the 'hell' of his confusion visually, rather than confront the quality that distinguishes a vital and functional being from a dead body."

The World Art interview with Sand fully demonstrates Witkin's unflinchingly ghoulish approach to becoming a more loving, unselfish person: He discusses a time when he stayed a few extra days in Mexico City, because he "wasn't getting the bodies [he] wanted." Witkin was able to convince the men from the morgue to not simply throw the bloated corpses onto their faces in the truck, because this routinely broke their noses, making them unsightly.

Witkin described one of the dead men brought in on the last day as "a real punk, nothing good visually." But he used him anyway: "For some people, the evidence of their spirit is either there or not there in death. Nonetheless, when I saw this last guy, I said, 'I want him.' I'm in this room with a dead guy. I'm propping him up, and I put a fish in his hand as a kind of prop, and I'm checking the lighting. I take a few photographs. And as soon as he's being autopsied, he starts changing! ... I turn to my Mexican translator, who is a very, very bright man, and we have seen the same thing. He says, 'He's being judged. This guy is being judged right now.'"

"Suddenly, he's not a punk any more. He's gone through this kind of transfiguration on the table, on the autopsy table. I say to the technician, 'Don't wash him down. I want all the blood from the suturing.' When they were carrying the brain, I said, 'Look at this brain -- it may have contained thoughts of evil, but however he was judged, he is now a different presence!'"

Witkin goes on to claim the corpse's fingers had miraculously grown an extra 50 percent, as if he were "reaching for eternity."

In another Mexican morgue episode, Witkin described how he created "Feast of Fools," one of his more fetching still-life prints, which features a dead baby slumped amid fruity abundance. He told Sand of his horror upon discovering a drawer full of bodily fluids with severed arms, legs, eyes, penises and little children floating around in them. "Because the bureaucracy is so incredibly corrupt, no one had said 'get this stuff out of here.' No one had the balls to do it. That time I did say, 'Why am I doing this?'"

But Witkin's divine mission prevailed over his outrage, and he liberally utilized the drawer's contents. "I did have the belief that there was a purpose to my being there," he concludes, "that I could make something beautiful."

Witkin is undeterred by naysayers, maintaining that those who don't like his work in actuality don't understand it. Says Witkin, "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. My art is the way I perceive and define life. It is sacred work, since what I make are my prayers."

You can imagine Joel-Peter Witkin's bloated statements explaining himself springing from the mouth of Dieter on "Saturday Night Live": "I am a dark poem. When every moment is transcendent, then images presented here will be seen as they truly were, photographs from a time resplendent in the atrocity we once called life. Touch my monkey."

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