Harm's Way: Lust & Madness & Murder & Mayhem

Harms Way brings together four unusual collections. Edited and with an introduction by Joel-Peter Witkin, the book includes turn-of-the-century crime-scene photographs, nineteenth-century asylum inmate portraits with calligraphic annotations detailing the patients' diagnoses, nineteenth-century medical photographs from the Burns Archive, and a selection of images from the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research. The ability of the photograph to show us our powerlessness in the face of madness, lust, disease, and death, survives in these brittle and arresting images.