The penultimate image in The Precipice is of a body in a morgue. Swaddled in white plastic and hoisted, mid-torso, on a hook, you can almost feel the dead weight of it, like a slab of meat in an abattoir. And if this seems a crude way to describe what was once a living human, it’s not wholly inaccurate. After death, the body becomes just so much inanimate matter.  For photographer Tony Chirinos, however, the image evokes the Ascension – in Christian theology, the occasion when Jesus was raised from the dead to take up a place in Heaven. Chirinos is not a religious man, but the photograph speaks to him of that moment when the human spirit transcends its mortal form.

Chirinos worked as a biomedical photographer for 16 years, and continued photographing in medical settings after his retirement from the profession in 2001. He’s familiar with the boundary between life and death, and with those whose work takes them back and forth across it every day. As a biomedical photographer, much of his workday was spent in operating rooms. The photographs that he took there had a single purpose – to show clearly the interior of the body and the surgical procedures performed on it. Early on, Chirinos started bringing a second camera with him into surgery, to fill the often-lengthy intervals between one assignment and the next.

He also brought a very different vision – one which reflects on the surgical patient as the stage for some of humanity’s most enduring questions. Is death a spiritual matter, or an earthly one? Does life cease when the soul’s light is extinguished, or, more prosaically, does death unfold slowly, as the body’s functions shut down? Faced with the end of life, should we place our faith in religion, or in the rationality of modern medicine? The Precipice suggests that these are false dichotomies. Both the operating room and the mortuary, as Chirinos’s photographs suggest, are places where questions of life and death are posed on a continuum between science and the sacred.

‘Between Science and the Sacred’, in Tony Chirinos: The Precipice
Hardcover, 96 pages
Published by Gnomic Book, 2021
Language: English
ISBN 78-1-7338877-6-2