Join us in the Leica Lounge on Thursday, October 20, 2022 at 7:00pm for a talk and book signing with photographer Tony Chirinos. Tony will give a presentation called, The Making of The Precipice, which is his most recent book. The book addresses how an artist has a biased eye. The eye that created these images as a project was the heart’s eye, and by its naiveté, it unwillingly structured an underlining theme of death and the vulnerability of life. In my work, that fleeing visual moment of death and vulnerability is the quiet context and the constant in all of my images. It’s the slow and steady pulse is as much a part of living as that first heartbeat of new creation. After the presentation, Tony will be available to sign books.

Says Chirinos, "The purpose of my work is to create a visual narrative for a story that examines rather than shies away from how precious life is. So much of death’s story remains untold, unseen, unwitnessed or experienced. My deep desire is to share, just a little, of death’s enigmas."


About The Precipice

The Washington Post calls it, "A potent meditation on life and death". The Precipice is the summation of nearly two decades spent working as a biomedical photographer in Miami. Chirinos threads the needle between the sometimes delicate, often brutal world of surgical intervention. The book is separated into three main bodies: surgical photographs of living subjects; vibrant typologies of exquisitely photographed tools; and the journey to the afterlife. The Precipice draws back the curtain to a world which most of us never see, where human fragility and resilience coexist in an uneasy equilibrium.

Featuring essays by Michelle Otero and Eugenie Shinkle, and a poem by Claudia Isidron, The Precipice is simultaneously lyrical and bleak, a celebration of life and an unflinching observation of what follows.

The book is available in a trade edition, in a Swiss-bound hardcover, and a more affordable "student edition", without a cover and enclosed in a printed manila envelope. There is also a poster, at 650x920mm, featuring Chirinos's photographs of surgical implements.

AUTHORS: Tony Chirinos, Eugenie Shinkle, Michelle Otero, Claudia Isidron

PUBLICATION YEAR: 2021
96 Pages with 75 images

The Leica Lounge is a lecture series hosted by Leica Store Miami which features presentations by local photographers, editors, gallerists and educators. Held monthly, these free events are designed to create and inspire the local photography community through sharing images and exchanging ideas.

About Tony Chirinos:
Tony Chirinos is a Miami-based photographer that explores the present human experience of death and vulnerability. His goal as an artist is to produce work that engages the viewer aesthetically and intellectually, that also moves beyond mere entertainment to something, which asks the viewer to think critically. Chirinos considers himself a documentary-style photographer, one that uses the visual language to create a photographic narrative. He strives in making sure that each photograph I make can stand by itself, with as much dynamic range, intellectual understanding and beauty as the entire photographic project.

Tony had the good fortune to receive a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University in New York (2003). Beforehand, he was trained as a Bio-medical photographer at Miami Children’s Hospital (1985), later in 1989 he created the Medical photography department at Baptist Health Systems until his departure in 2001.

During those years, he learned to produce the finest quality documentary photographs of the medical world which he later used as his artwork for some of my photographic projects. He is a Fellow of the South Florida Cultural Consortium (2010), recipient of Center’s Excellence in Teaching Award (2019) and was awarded the William Talbott Hillman Foundation grant (2021) to financially assist in the printing production of his first monograph, The Precipice (November 2021). Tony is a tenured professor of photography at Miami Dade College since (2003).

You can see more of Tony's work here.