Ottavio Di Paolo & Various Artists
Ottavio Di Paolo & Various Artists
Post Mortem
Otto Publishing
a5 format
100 pages
Edition of 100
From the artist:
Post-Mortem pictures were particularly popular in the Victorian age, where the infant mortality rate was very high and rarely Post-Mortem photos were the only photos the parents had of their children.
From the early 90’s of the 1900’s some artists restored this photographic practice, losing it’s “functional’ dimension, relocating the corpses to an area that crosses impassiveness and resumed and redone. "
Post Mortem book touches on a subject matter that I personally love. I always found the idea of photographing something or someone who is dead using photography to capture their last moment, looking at them for a last time and gathering that moment in the only medium that could portray that death on a raw way.
Post-Mortem photography allowed parents and families to have a portrait of their loved one, in a time when photography was expensive and not as common as today. These portraits, even if in their death, were a capture of a person’s essence in a way people could not experience before hand, like in painting. As photography grew in popularity, cost went down and it became a household item, we changed our focus on photographing our lives, and not our death. Photography of dead animals though, has picked up, sometimes as a metaphor for our lives, without the harsh reality of photographing a person who passed away.
This book collects various artists from different places and different photographic disciplines. What I love most about the book is the fact that all of the images are paired together to each other, without an artist name (there is a number that allows you to look at the back index and find out the artists name). This allows the images to connect in a fluid and natural way to one another, allowing the different approaches to juxtapose and letting the images talk for themselves.
The book is dedicated to the post mortem of animals. Some of the images are poetic, gentle and clean while some are gruesome and very brutal – showing the spectrum of what is death in general. All together, the book creates a beautiful homage to these animals, allowing us to pay attention to them carefully while also reminding us about death, cruelty, love and sadness at once.
The size of the book (A5) and the layout really create a dynamic book that makes the flipping easy and fun while still allowing the images to pop out from the pages in a size and quality that helps look deeply into their details. The layout is changing, with no ‘rules’ or systematic view which also helps create an interesting layout.
We recommend you getting a copy of this delightful book – there are only 100 copies! Get more information here (you can purchase the book via PayPal ottopublishing@outlook.it)
ontributing artists:
tuane eggers, stuart rose, stephan grob, marie-lou desmeules, alicja dobrucka, emma kisiel, erick camargo, eran gilat, bridgette broughman, benna, mari jo hoffman, andrew bruce, zbigniew olszyna, angilee wilkerson, krista steinke, rosaline shahnnavaz, anastasia markelova, fabian larrea meza, marta nagietowicz, rowan corkill, jose antonio martinez, sara engelhard, tara sellios, natalia szczech, ana nieto, jess smit, linda kou, joyce p. lopez, sven loeffler, marek volf, otto di paolo.
