© Tony Chirinos from the series Requiescat in Pace
Tony Chirinos has been making pictures of death for the past two decades. In his series Requiescat in Pace, grim light illuminates corpses in a morgue with a charge that is both scientific and poetic. In Beauty of the Uncommon Tool, Chirinos photographs scalpels and other surgical tools on hyper-saturated pastel backgrounds to appear almost floating in space. Divorced from their association with the operating table, they hang like musical notes or anthropological ephemera, which Chirinos acknowledges are an homage to Karl Blossfeldt's early twentieth century typologies of plants and flowers. In yet another series, Surgical Theater, Chirinos approaches the operating room as a stage of decisive moments. Like Garry Winogrand's classic photograph The Ladies on the Bench, or Larry Fink's series Social Graces, the surgeons' gestures are ripe with narrative.
Noticing a common thread between each of these series, Chirinos recently combined and re-edited them into a comprehensive collection of work titled The Marvelous Body. "Sometimes you create work with an intention, but later it changes with a different collective narrative," says Chirinos, acknowledging the combined series' ability to explore different angles of mortality. I spoke with Tony to learn more about his relationship to photography, fragility and death.
Interview by Jon Feinstein
