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- Tell me when it first

begins to blur.

- Blurring.

Sharp again-ish.

- One.

Two.

- They're both blurry.

Still blurry. - One.

Two.

- Blurry.

- Seven, here's eight.

- Uh, better. - What's larger and clearer?

Seven?

- Yeah.

- Here's eight. - Eight.

- Is this clear?

- It's sharp.

Sharpish.

Sharper.

Sharpest.

- Cause my eyes were brown as a child.

And then they turned, progressively green and blue.

- Interesting.

Now that's not very common.

- Well--

- What, do you have

green and blue siblings?

- No, they're all brown.

I want you smiling.

Smile.

That's good.

The hand is gonna be...

You're the hero or the heroine

because, she can see now, thanks to art.

You're going to basically be pointing,

well actually, you're going to be

displayed this way this.

That's looking good.

That's going...

Open the smile.

Open the smile.

Open the smile.

Good!

I need you to look at Julia.

That's good, that's good, that's good.

That's good.

Let's go.

Oh, no.

I want a smile, I don't want a...

Diff.

- I put out about 12, 13 colors.

And I'm used to that system of mixing.

Velázquez only put out five colors

and I have to put out 12.

It shows the disparity.

- My mother, when she was excited

or something happened, she would,

you know, see one of us and rather than

make a mistake, she would say, Joey, Jerry,

come here.

- Are you Joey or Jerry?

Are you Joey or Jerry, Jerry, Joey?

And that kind of pissed us off.

So in a way we were like little...

Like little sideshow people.

Like, oh, which one are you?

- I think we all wanna know...

Have kind of a touchstone into a beginning.

- Why we twins?

Why we're identical twins?

Why are we together?

In terms of, I don't know what it is to be

a singleton.

Be a person without a lookalike person.

We did everything together.

We slept together.

And I think we sort of woke up together

and go to the bathroom together.

And everything was together.

- We're called twins, but from the point of view

of my memory and the whole remembrance

of that whole thing, we were separate entities.

We just happened to be sharing a kind of a...

A place, you know, an apartment.

For nine months.

I was in the womb and there was

another entity besides myself, my brother.

And I was looking out of the glaucomic film

and I saw another glaucomic womb

and another entity there.

Which I knew I was a girl.

And I was talking to the...

Communicating somehow to the girl

and both our hands were on the surface, that skin.

And then, suddenly,

she and that whole womb

went away into the darkness and I knew

that I had experienced the end

of that person's life somehow.

So in a sense, I experienced death before I knew life.

- My mother didn't know she was having twins.

And it was a surprise to all of us.

I felt, gee, I have two brothers, you know?

And, I must tell you that they were very ill

for the first three months of their lives.

- I had swallowed and I shouldn't have swallowed.

And I was in the ICU for three days.

And I guess I was taken from the ICU

back to my mother.

She was breastfeeding Joel all the time.

And then at one point she said to the nurse,

"But it looks like the same baby."

And the nurse said, "you do have identical twins."

- Now this is adorable.

This is Joey at two years of age.

And this is where we usually took pictures.

And Joey looks very intent.

Like he's looking up at a plane

or a bird or maybe...

Or a building.

And here's the same with Jerry.

- In a sense, I guess when you're a twin

which I think is about one in every 10,000 births,

you know that there was something unusual, you know?

That there's a mirror image of yourself somehow.

But you're more aware that you have a different

consciousness than that otherness

that looks like you.

- And I think people maybe saw us as more

identical than we, inside, felt.

We knew we were not exactly the same.

We were individuals.

When I look at those pictures, in a physical sense,

I always had a wider face.

A little broader body.

Joel was more lean and thin.

His ears were a different shape than my ears.

My ears being closer to the head.

Our smiles were different in the photographs.

But we were conjoined in a societal way.

We were "the twins".

- Dressing twins identically was the style

at the time.

There are many photograph snapshots

of Joey and Jerry in the same exact outfit.

Sailor suits.

And sailor hats.

- I enjoyed it.

And I couldn't even say when,

probably when went to school, after kindergarten,

that we dressed differently.

- I don't know.

When they went to Catholic school, they wore

a white shirt and tie everyday.

So of course they were identical

with everybody else in the class, but...

Then, that petered out, when they were teenagers.

- Now this business is what I saw

as a child.

- Why?

- Well you have people making sandwiches.

When you have grocery people talking--

- What, you lived around here?

- 460 Graham Avenue, right over here.

- 460? - Yeah.

- Right over there.

- My mother owned the big store.

Sam's, there was a candy store.

- Right.

- There was two other stores.

- What, on the corner?

- Yeah, on the corner.

And uh--

- I mean, I wasn't here.

- I know, this was in--

- I came here in '74.

- This was in the '30s, '40s.

- Oh, wow. - And the '50s.

And I left here when I was nine-years old

or something like that.

Queens. - Uh-huh.

- But this was, the first neighborhood I had.

A dark memory is...

And that became the pictured Division Street.

My mother launching plates at my father

who's leaving with his bags through a door.

My mother closing the door.

And, you know, sweeping up.

And our life changed.

I think that was a real traumatic moment.

I don't remember anybody in the room

except I was in a chair.

I don't think it was a high chair anymore.

I was in a chair looking at my mother...

Going red in anger, blowing up at my father.

And she was near this cupboard of plates.

And as soon as he appeared with suitcases

and opened the door, she would launch

the plates and launch, and scream and scream.

And that door had the number five

at the other side of it.

And I think, suddenly, with three children

and two parents, the number five became the number four.

- Division Street was actually the name

of where my mother worked as a bookkeeper.

And why Jerry called it Division Street,

I don't know because it certainly wasn't

our residence.

It was where she worked.

But perhaps that is a meaning of division that,

the husband and the wife would divide.

I don't know.

- There was no men.

My grandmother lived with us.

And my grandmother was an invalid.

She had broken her leg years and years and years

before and unfortunately she never trusted,

she and her husband, my grandfather, never trusted

doctors and so, in time, the leg became gangrenous.

- I think he's wrong there.

I don't think, if it were gangrenous, she would've

been in the hospital.

- And I remember, in the morning I would wake up.

Kinda ready for school and I would smell two things.

My mother's making coffee.

I love coffee.

And then I would smell the kind of seepage,

the whatever's coming out of my grandmother's leg.

- Grandma always put on the coffee at about

4:30 in the afternoon.

And they had the old fashioned percolators.

And they would say in their Brooklyn accent,

is the water burling yet?

Is the water burling yet?

And that wonderful aroma of freshly perked,

percolated coffee would fill the air.

- She would like wet our hair with a hand

doing like this.

And she would take her hand and make a spit curl

on our forehead.

Which made us look like something of a

Tweedledum and Tweedledee in some kind

of horror show.

Was a little spit curl there but we had to keep it

to show her then we fixed it off.

- And this is a picture of my dead grandma,

Maria Antonia Valentina Conforte Pelligrino.

Joey took this picture.

- She was always quietly sitting in a chair.

And sometimes she had the radio on.

On Saturday she had the Italian station, opera.

And my mother would come in and very bossy,

and very kinda rough, would say,

"oh, that's terrible music.

"it sounds like they're selling fish."

And my grandmother would just let it go

and just keep listening to the opera.

But my mother would want to hear

certain records.

There's a record of a guy called Carmen Cavallaro.

And he would play this sort of wildly crazy,

difficult stuff on the piano and she would be gaga

about that.

She would say, "listen to that, it's wonderful."

She would run to a movie she would like.

Spend the whole day there.

You have to go and fetch her and find her.

Seeing a third time, a movie.

- Her goal was to be the piano player

in a movie theater.

And then, just like out of the blue,

the talkies came in.

So there was no more need for

a piano player in the theater.

- So there were times where an argument

would start, and it would build up

and I thought, my mother would say things like,

"this food tastes like poison."

And my grandmother would say, like,

she would say, "take me now, let me die."

And everybody would sulk.

I remember Sara going into a room

and like steam would come from under

the door of her sulking.

- She was pretty and bright...

She was always good at school.

She was reading all the time.

- I felt as if, you know, they just had more talent

than I had.

And so I tried to make up for it by,

by my reading and by my writing.

- She was so good at reading and writing

about what she read.

And we heard her go on these radio shows.

- And I once wrote a letter into a children's program,

I was a little older.

And I won a bike but my mother gave it

to my brother.

- We all spent time with my grandmother

while Mary, my mother worked.

But once I was getting ready to go to school,

at Saint Cecilia's, and it started to rain.

And I said to my grandmother, I said,

"it's raining, I don't wanna go."

And she said, "run between the drops."

And that was when I really, I believed her.

And this was how I knew I was somehow an artist.

To me it's suddenly very poetic, because my grandmother

couldn't run, couldn't walk very well.

It was very beautiful because she knew

we were active in a way she couldn't be.

- That's so her.

Run between the drops.

That's her philosophy.

Life is difficult, but try to run

between the drops.

If it weren't for grandma, I don't know

how bad it would've been.

Because there were lonely times, too.

- Only a few blocks down the street

was the 87th Street Precinct.

I would see the squad cars, the police cars

pull up.

I would see people coming in and out, you know?

Sometimes the police would drag somebody

up the stairs.

And it was a place, very, very exciting.

It was a place of good and evil.

- The police had an annual Christmas party

for the children.

We had a, to go to a local movie

and they'd give out presents.

Joey and I waited, for a long time

to get a toy called, The Dick Tracy Sub Machine Gun.

Dick Tracy with a comic strip with a sub machine gun.

Yeah, I couldn't wait to get it.

- You can get Mattel's fabulous new

Dick Tracy snub-nosed 38 pistol and special

belt holster or the exciting Tommy burst machine gun

for $3 each.

They're the only official Dick Tracy guns.

- We were sleeping together.

He gets up like, pfft, who knows, 6:00 in the morning.

For some reason, takes both of the freaking boxes

of the machine guns, goes out and he looks

for a different person to play with

at 1:00 in the afternoon.

We don't know where the hell he is.

He's coming up the steps slow, like he just

lost an arm or something.

I mean, he was totally demolished.

And we all said, "what happened?"

Well the boys up the street took both guns.

At some point, you know, I thought,

I never even got to touch these things, you know?

What was he doing?

- When Jerry was a little older

he began to draw like an old master.

He had chalk, black wood chalk.

And he did a very large picture of the comic book

character, Joe Palooka.

And all the kids were going around,

cause it was perfect, you know.

It was just perfect.

And all the kids were saying,

"hey, look at this guy, he's a genius.

"Look at this guy, he's a genius."

And my mother never forgot that.

And when she went to one of the museum's

where his work was exhibited when he was an adult,

she wrote a poem about it and said,

"I remember those kids saying what a genius, to Jerry,

"drawing Joe Palooka in the street.

"And now his work is in the museum.

"In Manhattan."

- I remember vaguely this woman sitting at

this little French easel and a canvas,

a little palette or something, and she got to draw,

and I was just watching her.

Just watching her.

I think maybe I was about seven-ish.

And what she was doing felt, like I'd be doing that

or something like that.

I felt a connection.

She had been painting two rustin' cars

in a lot between the buildings.

And I thought, that's what art is?

You know, things rotting.

And very unpretty and all that.

It was an interesting moment.

And then later I said to my mother,

"I also wanna paint.

"How do I start painting?"

I think Joey early on, but later than me

when I began painting and stuff, found the camera.

If he couldn't draw, he could take photographs.

He could see things through a lens.

- I don't know how it really was for him internally,

but I think that it must've been very difficult.

Because once, when we had Thanksgiving,

I wrote a poem about it and I called it, The Other,

and it was about Joey.

Cause Jerry's getting all this attention, you know?

And Joey was this nice-looking, blonde-haired boy

that played baseball and went to school.

And I'm sure that there were things in our past

that influenced his work greatly.

But I had no idea he was so deep.

Really I didn't.

Cause all of our focus was on Jerry.

- This, in my mind, not in his, I'm not sure

how he sees all that.

In my mind this was maybe the beginning of

our separation because of what we liked to do.

The pause between, say where I was,

where he began to find himself was enough

to make a difference between us.

- When Jerry was about to graduate from 8th grade,

Saint Cecilia's, he was accepted to the high school

of music and art.

And that's where the divisions began.

- My father would visit because he could

do that, you know?

Even though they were divorced.

And once, he came over and for some reason

he put me on his lap and he showed me the newspapers,

the daily news.

And he was showing me pictures of the battlefields,

cities crumbling, people dying, you know, falling down.

I was fascinated when he left.

And I waw alone and I was thinking about it.

I walked over to the window and the windows

of the apartment were these round windows.

And so I can see down on the street

and I thought, when I looked out that window,

that, as far as I can see, into infinity,

the world was there.

My world was there, Green Pointpoint.

But beyond that was the world at war.

And that was my first indication

of what I wanted to do with life.

I wanted to enter that far looking world

and take pictures there.

- Later on, when we could take our own time,

to go out of the house, take the subways,

the buses, he and I went to Coney island,

on a Saturday morning.

- By that time, Jerry was actually an accomplished painter

and he was making this big, big painting called Genesis.

And he asked me to go to Coney Island

to photograph The Freak Show.

- Freaks from the four corners of the world.

For two nickels, one dime,

a tenth part of a dollar.

We've got the show if you've got the dime.

It's just starting.

So hurry, hurry.

Look 'em over.

The lady without a head.

There are thin ones.

There are fat ones.

There all inside.

- There was copying from a slide Joey took.

A little slide in making the painting.

I think we both were taken by the idea of

you know, presentation of people who don't

look normal.

- I had the little Kodak Pony camera, 35 millimeter,

just color, and I fell in love with this woman

who I photographed who was the Star of David dancer.

I got color results later on, and I loved it.

And I went back and photographed Albert-Alberta

who was also photographed around the same period

of time by Diane Arbus.

It was a wonderful experience.

And by that time, the photographs I made

of the Star of David dancer and Albert-Alberta

weren't a kid's photographs of an event.

They were something that...

I had built into me.

I really found my medium.

And the medium was photography.

I went in the army when I was 21.

I was gonna be drafted.

So I said, instead of being drafted, I joined.

I enlisted as a photographer.

I was attached to intelligence.

I had top secret clearance.

I remember my mother went crazy

when the FBI came over to Graham Avenue

to interview her.

The first jobs I had was, we sent up drones.

Very primitive drones.

And then those drones would have cameras on them.

They would photograph infrared film.

We had to go out there and get the drone

and bring it back to the mobile lab

which was on a deuce and a half ton truck,

a 2 1/2 ton truck, which is a mobile photo lab.

And we had to basically process the film

and get it over to intelligence.

That's why I needed top secret clearance.

- He wanted to join the army, number one,

I think, because it offered him

a chance to learn how to make more types

of photography.

Because when he came back from Fort Dix,

he was bald, he was in uniform.

He was, with a watch on.

He was very happy to be in the army.

He had adventures going on.

I was at school and I was 21.

In the Hauptschule for the Billiken Kunst in Berlin,

now West Berlin.

We could take a train from the West, take 15, 30 minutes,

you can go any place in the East, come back.

The West people are good, the East people suddenly,

like that period of time, they were not allowed

to leave the East.

I was finished with my course in school.

I packed up my stuff but I said, one more time,

I'll go into the East.

There's one wonderful store that sole

these Leipzig reductions of paintings which

you couldn't get anyplace else.

So I bought them, they're on the train,

and at that point, only West people are leaving.

Because you can't leave as an Eastern.

If you tried to escape you'd be killed, same say.

The train was starting to roll.

And it stops.

And I think, it's still an alley.

And this girl gets on, a sweaty white blouse.

Very nervous.

Black skirt.

She has a cello case.

And she gets on.

The way she's walking, we know she's escaped.

Which is bad because if she's caught,

she's dead the same day.

And we're all counting, this fix stops

to the West.

We all know that there's a lot of people

will make money from the government

if they snitch on this kid.

And the whole place has suddenly changed into

hoping we make every stop to the West.

And no one's looking at her.

She was nervous and people very tense.

And we go into the, almost last stop.

And then the train suddenly moves

and it stops.

The door rips open.

There's a woman in uniform, grabs the kid

and there's a guy with a sub machine gun

and I see the girls mouth open.

And for some reason, I just can't look anymore.

I don't even hear anymore.

I can't even hear her voice.

And I just turn my head around.

And the door shut.

The cello case, there's all this clothing

and the kids gone.

She's either gonna be hung or shot

within the next 10, 12 hours.

We got into the station and I got out

and my life's changed.

Suddenly, art is no longer an exercise

in how good I am.

It's maybe how bad the world is.

It's an exercise in responding to

what could happen.

Which might not be a good thing.

- What drives me is the desire to fulfill

an idea.

An idea with a purpose.

Because I think so much work, art today,

has no purpose.

It's facade.

It has no depth.

My images are about stories.

Come on Kathy Brown.

Come on.

I leave everything up to chance, to fate.

If I read something, it makes me think of something.

I have this idea or I see a person,

it basically stirs something up.

And I'm constantly making those sketches

and drawings and visual associations.

And then I find myself taking more and more time

on one particular subject or having one particular

interest in somebody or something or some

facet of time, then I'll basically do little

sketches of what I wanna do.

What I wanna make as photographs.

- He gives me the biggest challenges.

He uses an aspect of my training that I would

probably let go atrophy.

He gives me pieces to copy.

And their all different.

They could be medieval one day.

Or they could be, like recently it was

the Jackson Pollock.

I've run into a bit of a problem when he takes

a small painting that has a particular type

of brush work and I have to blow it up

really big, like 24 feet.

Then I have a hard time langoring those brushstrokes.

He's quite patient and persistent.

And he often says things like, "well, when's

"it gonna look like the painting?"

I just die cause, ah!

The Hiller image was fun for me because

it is both backdrop and prosthetics.

And it's artists that I love to paint.

More mimic or imitate.

It was an Otto Dix painting so it was like

1930s and 40s, I really like to copy that.

- The tones.

- Having your whole body painted white,

you don't feel naked.

I feel like a figure in a work of art,

rather than, exploited in any kind of way.

I'm an art historian and I research

the representation of disability in art,

and work by disabled artists.

And I was writing a lot about Joel's work,

and I, the short answer is I wanted to put

my body where my mouth was, so to speak.

So I posed for the tableau in New Mexico

in 2007.

It was a portrait, I was shot from behind

that time.

And I enjoyed it.

And we talked about me doing another photograph.

Like he staged my body like a work of art.

He saw its uniqueness as beautiful

and aesthetic.

- Your body is, from last time,

the other shot we did, your body is

very, very wonderful looking, very emotional

and it's right for this.

No, I love it!

I love it, leave it!

- He gets to twist the world,

just a little bit.

Just stick a fork in and twist it.

Like pasta.

- I've been doing this for over 40 years

and as Bob Dylan once said,

"I'm glad the poem hasn't run out."

- 90% of the time he's just a happy guy

who tells jokes.

And enjoys the process of creating

in tandem with somebody else, co-creating

with somebody else.

- A quarter of a second at 16 1/2.

My favorite stuff.

- On some aspects, Joel for me is,

he's kind of this loud, myopic,

genius artist driving folks around him crazy.

And then another time he's my extremely

caring and sweet Jewish grandma who wants to

feed me and overfeed me.

- And stop, that's it, that's it.

That's good, stop him.

Hitler I wanted angry.

Angry.

And just where I want Michael.

Michael, I want this kinda.

- Hand positions are really important.

Whether or not someone's hands look kinda flat

and bulky or do they look kind of delicate?

- I want this kind of gesture.

Like, that's good, that's good.

No, no, I want this, look.

Look at me.

This kind of thing.

It's like it's nothing, that's perfect.

Lower it so I can see it against the black.

That's it, that's it, that's it.

That's it.

Okay, that's, no, no Michael, head up

and look at me a little bit.

That's good.

That's gettin good.

It's getting good.

Smile.

Hitler, smile.

Look at Hitler.

Oh, that's great.

Oh my God!

Oh, oh, oh.

I wanna see your face, Michael.

Good, I like it.

And we'll do the same thing with smiles.

And that's the last shot.

Same thing with smiles.

Okay, smile Michael.

All right, we're done.

- And boom, it is all over.

At which point the entire set gets taken down.

Aspects of the props are handed to the models

as gifts.

And it's all over.

The next we'll have to take a white roller

and go over the entire backdrop.

- I am making a painting that is about Aleppo.

And it came about by my reading of the New York Times

and how one is watching without being able

to help.

The deterioration of, especially the city

of Aleppo.

Children, hospitals, the concentrated effort

to destroy any aid to these people

as they're suffering.

So my feeling, as I read this is,

what is this country doing about it?

What can I do about it?

So I began a picture of a man reading this.

A man getting upset by this.

A man imagining him holding a child

and maybe helping this child

from the catastrophe around the child.

And labeled the last painting as the man

knowing that he is only reading about it

and he can't do a damn thing about it.

Maybe I can't stop things like that,

but the paintings and the drawings

and maybe make other people say,

there shouldn't be this.

There shouldn't be this again.

You have to say something like,

I'm a witness.

I'm a witness to this horror

and this shouldn't happen.

This goes back to Goya doing the events

of war in his own time.

I concern myself with the lives

of other people.

And I think there's something about,

you know, the fragility of life.

Fragility of getting through it all.

But I think, we have to concern ourselves

with each other because, that's what

being human is.

- I was too involved with being in life,

the wonder of life, the discovery of everyday.

And I've never felt this kind of need

to be close to my brother.

I respect his life.

I respect what he does.

And I've always, as soon as I could,

I moved away.

- We've been together since the middle 80s

so it's 30 years.

I take care of the business side of the art,

the bookkeeping side and...

Just kind of keeping track of the ins

and the outs.

Jerome's art is a business and, you know,

there's every single receipt for every

tube of paint and every paintbrush and so,

there's a lot of minutiae.

- What Joel told me to do to take care

of this photograph, because it's encaustic,

it's covered in wax, and the wax blooms with time,

so he said you just put your hands on it

and you just rub.

And then first time he showed me how to do it,

he was here, we did it on my kitchen counter.

And I've never seen anyone touch a piece of art

like that before.

Usually it's a hands off thing,

especially with a photograph.

But he said with this, you just rub it.

And the warmth of your hand

on the wax takes the bloom away.

So, it's the care and maintenance of this

particular image that I come up and do in the attic.

I probably have 40 photographs of his,

most of them framed, some in boxes still.

I also have artifacts from the images.

So, you know, if I add everything up,

I have quite a few pieces of photography,

artifacts, gifts that he's given to me,

letters, magazines.

Reviews, interviews.

The best friend of my mother-in-law,

her son had opened a photo gallery in San Francisco

in the mid 80's, and she asked me to do her

a favor and go visit the gallery just so someone

was going into her friend's gallery.

And so, I kept going in to the gallery,

one day someone said to me in the gallery,

I want to show you these photographs.

And he pulled out of the drawer the images

of Joel's that stopped me dead.

I've never seen anything like that.

And it was disturbing at the same time

as it was intriguing.

And I couldn't get it out of my mind.

And at that time, Robert Mapplethorpe

was huge in America, people, everybody knew

about Robert Mapplethorpe.

And there was a certain beauty to his work,

especially the pieces that were printed on canvas

the male nudes, the calla lilies, but for me,

they didn't have the intellectual bit

that Joel's pieces have.

I kept going back, and the first piece that I bought,

the one of Lisa Lyon like a Greek statue.

It's in my bedroom, it's hanging in my bedroom.

Joel reveled in just that photograph

that's in Vanity Fair

of the family scene, of the son, his wife,

his wife's lover, another woman

in the photograph who's naked

who's a family friend, so you don't know

quite what kind of a relationship they have.

And that was important to Joel, to have that

out there in the public.

Cynthia was always bisexual, and you know,

we had this arranged that she would go out,

and sometimes sleep over with a woman,

and come back, it was pretty open.

So, one night, she did return early in the morning,

it was at 2:00 o'clock maybe, with this woman.

And she said, this is Barbara,

and she's gonna be living with us.

That was the beginning of this kind of triune,

and it really worked until the time

I realized that after 20 years of being

with Cynthia, that a change had happened.

And I got a call from Cynthia saying

that she had found this woman,

and she wanted me to come back

and then we'd live this woman.

And I said, "I don't want that.

"Barbara's part of our family."

So, finally what happened is that

she moved out, and I said to Barbara,

"it's gonna be you and me, and we're going

"to be here at the ranch, and we're

"gonna live our lives."

- I'm always worried about this one when she spits.

Uh oh, I hear her regurgitating.

Okay, go eat.

Don't spit at me, thank you.

Since I've been sick, it's everything for me.

And I'm not saying he gives up a trip for me.

But he does put a lot of effort

into making sure that I am comfortable,

have everything I need.

Calls me, writes me, does all the right things,

it seems like.

I didn't start worrying until about,

I don't know if worry is the right word.

Maybe until about a year ago.

I started thinking about, hmm, things

weren't going quite my way.

But look at all the good things that came out.

We got to travel.

I did everything I wanted to do.

- I have collected Joel's work

for somewhere between 25 and 30 years.

And this upcoming show in Mexico City,

I am very excited about seeing

what the show is like.

Because I, of course, am very interested

in Joel's work.

And I know Jerome's work.

I've been to a show in San Francisco

many years ago.

But to see the work together,

it makes such sense.

The fact that they're identical twins,

and that they're both in the arts.

It's quite amazing.

- I think Joel, in time, found his niche

as a photographer.

I think we're both gifted that way.

And it was the right place to be.

But the thing I really honestly

don't understand is, my brother,

even with all his exhibitions in the 80's and 90's

would call me up and constantly not say

how are you, he would just say,

I have this show in Japan, I have this show there.

He wanted to, you know, make clear that he

was doing very well, and perhaps better than I was.

Even in the early periodicals about his work,

I was never mentioned.

His chronology never mentioned

he had a twin brother.

- Oh my God.

Oh, look at that flag, that's a huge flag.

That's beautiful.

- So, you were here nine years ago?

- 94 last time.

- Oh, 94, so 20 years ago.

- Yeah.

First time I was here I was so old,

the conquistadors were here.

These are nice.

Oh, this is a photograph.

- Is it?

- Yeah, it's a tin type.

You can hardly see the little cut.

So nice.

This is nice.

- When we talk the work of artists,

you say like, isn't Rembrandt great?

We don't say, wasn't he great?

We said, isn't he great?

Isn't Giotto incredible?

And that's amazing, because we don't

talk about these people in the past tense.

They're with us, they're with out consciousness.

We share with them their image and their soul.

And I think that's a remarkable thing.

- When I walk through the exhibition in Mexico

of the Witkin & Witkin show, I've never seen

as much work by Jerry as that.

I realized that he has incredible

potency, a great facile for painting.

He's trying to change society as I am.

But it's a different medium.

The only reference that was in the Witkin & Witkin show

that was a surprise to me is the fact that Jerry had made

a painting based on New York theater

in 1939 by Hopper, and I was making one too.

- I've always been attracted to

Edward Hopper's painting called New York Movie,

done in 1939, which is the year both

Joel and I were born.

- I believe I started my work earlier,

it doesn't matter.

- I thought it was unbelievable twin like,

identical twin like to be concerned,

both of us, unknown to each other,

to dealing with the same subject matter.

- In Hopper's painting, they're watching

a movie, a few people in the audience,

and it's kind of abstract.

You don't know what it is.

It's about kind of boredom and isolation.

And Hopper did that beautifully.

In Jerry's painting, the usherette's there,

and there's a scene of the holocaust.

- In 1945 in movies all across the world,

British filmmakers were filming Belsen Bergen,

Concentration Camp, how bodies were

being plowed into ditches.

And this was highly disturbing to see.

Suddenly, in Movie Tone News,

which was on the screens then as active movie

images of what's happening in the world,

and I thought, my God, if I made a picture

of a movie theater in 1945,

everybody would be very different.

The bored woman in the Hopper picture

would be very different from the person

hearing or watching that screen.

- In my work, you just don't see a movie theater,

you engage in history.

They're coming through a layer

of the beata of Christ and the Virgin, Mary.

Of Christ and little Jesus at the same time.

And then there's the anti-Christ person,

a person with the 666 in the audience.

And what he's looking at is Metropolis

by Fritz Lang.

And it's about the good and bad Maria.

- Being part of this project has forced them,

you know, to have some shared experiences.

And kind of take a moment to look back

and look where they are, and look at each other.

- I don't think there is a relationship

between my work and Jerry's work.

We've lived apart, we've worked apart.

And we're individual entities as artists.

- We were extremely alike, we finished,

I remember, each other's statements

and sentences, and at the same time,

there was a point where, I think we varied

our interests, we parted.

- If we were both still photographers,

then we would see what was really going on

when we were being nurtured in the womb,

and we'd have probably a better understanding

as life as it's shared within a medium.

But we work in two different mediums.

- The woman pictured here is my wife, Lisa Pennella.

We had one child, Andrew,

who was born with a very rare blood disorder.

And he lived for only 16 years.

It was the child that would be a memory to her

and not an adult for her.

He would be about 23 now.

Over the 16 years, we held it together

and raised a kid who had every chance

of not growing up.

When it was shown in Mexico, I saw

her posing next to it.

People said, could you pose next to your picture?

And she kind of accepted it.

That painting is one of my best paintings.

I didn't know it would happen that quickly.

I was planning something, and I told Lisa,

I said, I really want to do a picture

of you mourning, somehow, our Andrew.

I said, just come in the studio.

Just put on some shirt, and I want

you to hold a picture.

- I think he already had the design

of the picture in his head,

so I mean, it was pretty much a straightforward,

you know, look at the setup in the studio

and did a couple drawings,

and went right on the canvas.

- This picture came all by itself.

It's almost like it made itself besides my brush,

it just happened very quickly.

And I showed the picture, and she,

Lisa's a very quiet woman, she just looked at it

and just left, she didn't say anything.

And I know in that moment that her brain,

which is very complex and brilliant,

she was putting together a lot of good

feelings about that picture.

- It was a story, but it was, like, my story,

and it wasn't too dramatic.

It was, you know, meaningful without being overstated.

- Most people who come here and see my artwork

are very interested.

Some people are floored and want to come back again

because they're familiar with Joel's work.

My sister on the other hand, when she comes

to visit me, she's so troubled by the images

in the room that she stays in

that she covers them with a towel

so that she doesn't have to have bad dreams

at night, I guess.

So, over time, what I've seen Joel's work go

is move from images that were difficult

to take in to now, almost

all of his images, most of his images have

a beauty and often a tenderness that I didn't

see in his earlier photographs.

- I plan something, put it together,

80% of the time, it works, and when it works,

I process the negative.

It's very, very perfect, analogue stuff,

classical photography.

I choose the chemicals I sometimes mix,

the toners I mix too.

But I look at the negatives, like the contact prints,

and then spend several hours looking

at the one I want to choose.

I never keep any work around

that I've done before.

I don't want to look at that.

That happened in the past, it's not at the moment.

I have two machines, two industrial enlargers.

They're De Vere's, they're English.

I spend a lot of time researching

the lenses I use, I love doing that.

And then I'm in my sanctum.

- Her face is incredible.

It's incredible.

- I've been here for 45 years.

They hired me to teach things like painting

and drawing.

And really my life and my career comes

with the contract to Syracuse.

So, what's the point of drawing?

It's to have a deep experience.

You look at a good actor in a performance,

and you think, oh my God, I'm with them.

When you see a drawing, you think,

oh my God, I see what they're after.

The guy posing is gonna be Adam

being tossed out of paradise.

So, as you get older, you shrink towards the center.

What you want to do is get back out there again.

I'm gonna start the drawing by actually

finding the plant of his feet, and then start

to draw the body from there up.

It's a little trickier thing.

But if we can measure and control,

and we have the form we want, and then

we can exaggerate the forms themselves.

When I go back to his arm,

both arms, he's got some wonderful

kind of play with the fingers on his head.

The twisting is the back of the hand,

and the wonderful digits that he presents

on his head.

You take the face in terms of the structure

of the forehead.

And we take the eye, and we take

the cheek muscle, the nose.

And before we know it, we have something

like the pose.

- Exhale.

Inhale.

- I teach art because I think we can influence

people's wanting to know more about it.

You can teach some individuals what it is

to make harder choices to make their own art.

- I think he's far more deeply into

intellectual things, the motivations,

he's an educator.

I'm not an educator, I'm, basically,

I'm an adventurer, a visual adventurer.

That's what I am.

- I guess I was just searching for

images that had a certain kind of blunt,

brutal, intensity.

This is why we went to Witkin and Francis Bacon.

This sort of ripped off face idea

is one of the few homages in the video,

direct homages to Joel-Peter Witkin.

♪ You get me closer to God ♪

♪ You can have my isolation ♪

♪ You can have that hate that it brings ♪

- One can assume that one cockroach

in one soup is one cockroach too many.

And I feel the same way about the national

endowment for the arts.

Joel-Peter Witkin has severed

the head from a corpse, skinned it,

and scooped out the brain, and transformed

that mutilated head into a flower vase.

He then photographed it, and he submitted,

as I say, the photograph to the N.E.A.,

and his cash reward from the N.E.A.

for that was $20,000, taxpayer's money.

This is one half of the guy's head,

this is the other half.

Now, that is what you call beautiful art.

And I'm sure it was worth $20,000 to somebody,

but I don't think you'll find many American taxpayers

who would agree that his or their money

ought to be used to pay reward

to the guy who did that.

- People bring their own baggage to whatever they see,

you know?

And what they see is what they want to see,

what the believe in.

What I can realize and put forth is

images that are purposeful and strong

and beautiful and relevant.

I love the unloved.

When Barbara got sick, it didn't even dawn

on me that she had cancer.

You know, I would drive her to the cancer center,

and then she would say to me,

well, I'm here because I have cancer.

I said, well, you never really told me that.

What happened over the next six years

was the alimentation of her dying.

And I was a caregiver for the last six months

when she was in hospice at the house,

in the big room, the library.

For me, that was one of the most

wonderful experiences of my life.

I mean, she was very gracious.

- Joel is the main cook.

Although Joel tends to sometimes overdo things,

like he thinks more is better, like more

spices and things like that.

Or he'll put the broccoli in the blender.

I don't know why.

I like my vegetables so you can identify them.

But he won't listen to me.

He gets outraged.

I always thought I had a bedside manner

of a pathologist, you know,

very cold and staying unobjective,

until Barbara got sick, then I changed.

- I think people's perception of him is incredibly

different, Joel the public man from Joel the private man.

He is a very kind, compassionate, loving person.

- I was attending her, I would change the urine bag,

I would clean her up when she lost control,

and it was an act of love.

It's back to my grandmother and my mother

and coffee and love.

And it was very important to me.

And it was a grey moment, love of my life.

And I'll always be with her.

When you're young, you think you're never gonna die,

everything is forever, and that kind of stuff.

You need that for the dynamism of your life

and what you're gonna do, and the whole

maturation of events that occur

that you have to decide on, and the quality

of decision.

But when you get older, you have this kind of

more gentle romanticism, you're concerned,

things are far more poetic and loving

because they're going to disappear.

- It's hard, you know, to lose a partner,

and kind of re-find yourself or equalize yourself.

When I've spoken to him since Barbara's death,

I feel like he has, he's much softer,

he's much easier for me to speak to.

And, you know, I feel like, you know,

that, especially that first year

after you lose someone, you're so tender,

that I feel that too when I speak to him.

Jerome and Joel, you know, they have

common experiences as children,

but then they kind of diverge so dramatically.

And now that they're in their late 70's,

I mean, better to make peace and for them

to have if not a close relationship,

a good relationship, an open relationship.

- We can be in the same room,

we can talk to people together,

and yet we don't talk to each other.

- I think it's Jerry's nature

to be more distanced, and basically

more, ohh...

Less, well, more formal, and less informal.

- I don't call him up to say much.

When he calls me up, it's something

important for him.

He called me up last time to get the name

of a carpenter who made a crucifix for him

for an earlier work.

And we didn't share anything after that,

it was just, okay.

- We lived separate lives in different

parts of the country, we've have different

experiences, and I don't find anything odd about it,

it's the fact that it's the way it is.

Okay.

Mercedesville.

Got this car for $3,000.

I get all used cars.

- I thought of the death of one us a lot.

And I think it would be hard,

it would feel like you've lost an identity.

Knowing that Joel is there, working

just continues our history.

I mean, it's like the sun comes up

and the sun goes down.

There is my twin, and he's there and I'm here.

Even though we don't communicate

maybe 99% of the time, we know that we

are existing, we are working, and of late,

we're showing together.

We are strangers, and I think we leave it there.

- From around 1606.

Act 3 Scene 8, a plain near Actium.

- Is it Romeo and Juliet?

- The play is Antony and Cleopatra.

Daily double.

The engraving of this young man

and his father is entitled father,

I cannot tell a lie, I cut the tree.

- George Washington.

- Lisa.

- Who is George Washington?

- Yes.

Blood Falls, which flows into Lake Bonney

get its color because it is rich in this element.

- Copper.

- Iron.

- Iron, yeah.

- Okay.

Oh God, they fool you again.

It's a commercial.

Ugh, shit.

- A street in New Orleans

which is named Elysian Fields, and runs between

the L & N tracks and the river.

- Street car named desire.

- Desire.

- Derek.

- What is Street Car Named Desire?

- That's the play.

In 1978, this redheaded stranger

released Stardust, an album of pop standards.

- Willie Nelson.

- Who is Reba McIntyre?

- No.

- Willie Nelson.

- It was Willie Nelson.

- Country music 600.

- In 1975 a double album was--

- Wait, in 18, that was the war of 1812,

The Star Spangled Banner.

What's it called?

A literal one of these two word terms

in the beginning of '64, enjoyed musical,

it's something to do with, uhh...

A musical beginning in 1964,

enjoyed a musical one.

Stars and Stripes?

- Julie, you were on this like a shot.

You started writing immediately.

Let's see if you came up with the correct response.

You wrote down, what is a British invasion,

and you are right.

- Ah.

- On the scale of 100, I'm maybe 22 in knowledge.

But some of these people are like,

beyond 100, they're amazing.

- Ah, shit.

Well, that's it.

Damn it.