Syringes 2015

Curator: Here we have Elina Brotherus's "Syringes," a 2015 photographic still life. What are your initial thoughts? Editor: Overwhelming, if I’m honest. A visual overload of plastic and glass – and a reminder of medical interventions. The stark clarity feels almost clinical. Curator: Indeed. This image of discarded syringes and vials taps into a deep well of anxieties and hopes connected with healthcare, perhaps infertility treatments, given Brotherus’s known personal history and photographic projects on the topic. Consider the cultural memory embedded in these everyday medical objects. The yellow and clear plastic create a visual code that resonates on many levels. Editor: Yes, but also consider what each syringe implies: labor. Raw materials extracted, refined, manufactured into precisely calibrated instruments, shipped and stored… It is an entire complex system visualized. It feels almost sculptural in its composition, like a modern vanitas still life where our consumption takes medical form. Curator: Vanitas is right. The ephemeral markings—dosage information, expiration dates—etch a timeframe on objects ultimately meant to be disposable. Consider the psychological weight we imbue even the simplest tools with, making a simple plastic object pregnant with layers of anxieties surrounding sickness, control, and potentially even mortality. Editor: Right, but then what about that high sheen from her use of photography? Think of how images mediate experience, how they too rely on industrial production, how seeing here simulates tactile absence by privileging vision at the exclusion of any sense of direct touch, even danger. Curator: Brotherus expertly utilizes contemporary aesthetics to invite critical considerations on material and immaterial anxieties of living in a world where the boundary between natural life and scientific intervention becomes ever-blurred. Editor: An appropriate summary. This photo reminds me of the staggering interconnectedness embedded even within images and medical tools that we can no longer overlook in any meaningful dialogue about care, healing, or material presence in photographic form.