Christian is an award winning editorial and art photographer, formerly based in New York City for the last 30 years, he now calls Los Angeles home.
Born in Manchester, England in 1966 to an American painter father and a Dutch mother, he spent most of his youth in Amsterdam. He moved to the US to study photography at Syracuse University in Upstate New York. There he ignited a passion for capturing the human spirit in photographs that he’s nurtured ever since. Christian moved to New York City to grow his dream and assist several photographers including Peter Lindbergh, Bruce Weber and Annie Leibovitz. It wasn’t long until Witkin launched his solo career with a stunning series of black & white street portraits which lead to portrait commissions with Vanity Fair, the New York Times magazine and Vibe.
Witkin aims to explore the light and dark places of the human psyche by stripping his subjects down of all baggage and artifice until what is before him is the pure essence of his subject. This curiosity has taken him around the world, where he has made 15 trips to India; embedded himself with a group of Thai transsexuals and traversed Ethiopian tribal societies. His work harkens to the anthropological documentarian August Sander and the streetwise Diane Arbus.
Current projects include several book preparations, including 25 years of his celebrity portraits titled CERTAIN PEOPLE; a massive 25-year study of the people of India titled INDIA STREET PORTRAITS; his study of the transsexual community in Thailand titled WOMEN ONCE MEN; lastly he book titled ORDINARY BEAUTY, a culmination of 25 years of portraits, nudes and bodily fragments on the subject of women.

Witkin’s work appears in major magazines such as New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Vibe, ID, Elle, Harper’s Bazar and W Magazine and his personal work has been exhibited in New York, Amsterdam, Tokyo and Paris since 1991.