Skull Portraits by Carsten Witte.
Carsten Witte, born in 1964, is the venerable priest of beauty. Already as a little boy of three he slack-jadedly gazed after beauties that where passing by when he was walking at his mother’s hand. Many years later, after he had attended the Bielefeld school of photography, worked as assistant for renowned photographers and started his career as a freelancer with his own studio, he could finally dedicate himself exclusively to his perfect esthetics at taking shots of beautiful woman’s bodies, their eroticism and chasteness and the sensual play of shadow and light, whereas he has never betrayed the deference to the beautiful creature.
Numerous national and international fashion and lifestyle magazines engaged the master of modern form finding and even in the advertisement Witte distinguished himself with the subtle and extremely reduced structures in his images. “It’s always faces that fascinate me and this mysterious purity of really beautiful people“, he said.
Carsten Witte’s beauties are naked but never bare. They rather seem to feel secure in the superposing shadows. The interpretation of his works is basically left to the beholder but as a matter of fact he is subtly directing the view through his mise-en-scène.
An US magazine called him the „David Lynch of fashion photography“. His images are mystery plays, you never know exactly what is going on. Carsten Witte offers the parts but everyone has to solve the mystery himself.