Photographer Goran Bertok is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. These images are from the project ‘Post Mortem‘. To see Goran’s body of work click on any image.
When I was looking at the possibility to take photos of corpses I was often asked why should I deal with such an unpleasant topic. One possibility is to answer the question with a new question: Why should I not deal with such an important, interesting and fatal topic? I find the question of death, the question of the end of life very important.
There are many answers why to deal with death, merely dealing with thoughts about the ephemerality of our lives, about mortality and the fragility of our bodies, about the question if death is something completely natural for humans (as it is for animals) or not; about the question, if someone’s death is a tragedy or not. But on the other hand, there is just a result of photographic work -a photography – and the effect on the viewer and his thoughts and feelings.
From the very beginning of my photographic work, I was interested in the human body – the human body and violence and pain. I usually think about a death of a human being as an act of violence and complete destruction. In this sense, I see the motif of the dead human body as a natural proceeding of my photographic work.
In Omen the violence was a metaphor; I used the SM rituals to expose questions of pleasure; about human freedom to choose his own way of getting pleasure, about possessing and sometimes transforming his own body.
In Survivors, I was attracted to the ideological violence in the WWII concentration camps and about people who survived that violence and can witness this violence with their memories and their bodies.
In Post Mortem, the series deals with nude, death, pieces of meat which once were a human body and human beings. The link between the fact that a human owns his body and in the same moment belongs to its body was broken once and for all, irreversible. Now the question is how to get rid of the corpse. But this is another story.
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By Goran Bertok
