Twin Palms Publishers issued The Bone House in November 1998 as a 196-page hardcover measuring ten inches square, with ninety-two four-color plates and an essay by Eugenia Parry. The photographs are by Joel-Peter Witkin, who selected the images himself for the collection. They range from his early Coney Island “freak show” studies to work current at the time of publication, making the volume a retrospective survey.

Witkin’s portraits of subjects both living and dead bring mortality into compositions that the publisher characterizes through the grotesque. The book’s arc is described as a sojourn, each photograph a station along a path that veers between oblivion and salvation. Across the plates, the body, mortality, and the photographic image itself recur as central concerns.

The generous square format gives the plates room on the page, so the sequence can be read as a sustained visual argument rather than a portfolio of isolated pictures. Parry’s essay provides a textual counterpart to the images, while catalog subject terms such as photography of the grotesque, the dead, photomontage, and pictorial and illustrated works confirm the book’s distance from conventional portraiture.

The collection’s retrospective scope is its defining feature: images made across decades, chosen by the photographer, gathered in a single Twin Palms volume. The act of selection brings an autobiographical dimension to the volume: it is a retrospective shaped by the photographer’s own choices. For readers, the experience is cumulative, moving through stations of a sojourn, with the publisher’s themes of oblivion and salvation offering a way to consider the whole.