Mortality Stories / "Screen - a painless management of corpses¨ (Viewer discretion is advised)

Portraits / analogue photography

2000

Greece

People choose to plunge into oblivion the knowledge of their mortality. From a young age they learn that they have their whole life ahead of them, that they will die in old age. They behave arrogantly and chuckle in the face of the unexpected death, the sudden death, of others, as something that does not concern them, something that is not going to happen to them.
I found myself on the doorstep of the morgues to close the loose ends I had with the fact that my mother died in childbirth. I have always used my photographs as diaries and at the same time as "closing accounts" of certain events that happened to me; I wanted my thesis, on the occasion of completing my photographic studies, to be an attempt to close this great trauma. To try to find the event within myself, to encode it through my gaze and try to say goodbye to the pain, using my images as a bandage.
I made these pictures under unbearable pain, awe, horror, respect. I wanted these ‘still life’ portraits to spring from tenderness and sensitivity, to have the fact of death removed, to look alive, beautiful... Looking for an image I never saw, I use the camera as a healing tool in the same way that our skin heals and replaces lost or damaged skin, leaving behind a scar that intimately tells the story of the trauma.
At the same time, in this environment I explored my own fear of dying, my fainting at the sight of blood, and whether the camera was interfering with the event, acting as a screen that could change my reaction to it. After each shoot, I kept written journals describing the circumstances and emotions during the shoot.
First, I researched my questions through oral testimonies from doctors and morgue attendants. This led me to psychology to study the relevant theory, and then to six months of voluntary work in Hellenic Police Forensic Science Division. Then experiential, through photography. At the same time, I began to write the theoretical texts that were to accompany the photographs.
After obtaining a special permit, the first "diagnostic" photographs were taken in April 1995 during a body dissection and in July 1996 during a brain dissection. In April 1999 I returned to the morgues to take the final photographs.
The project was completed after five months of shooting in the morgues. It consists of 20 b/w analogue photographs of 40x60 cm, entitled "Screen: a Painless Management of Corpses", accompanied by theoretical texts on the subject and my experiences during the photographing. It was presented in 2000 at the Department of Photography of the University of West Attica (Athens), with Dr. Fotis Kaggelaris, Costis Antoniadis and Achilles Nasios as lecturers.