According to Roland Barthes, every photograph represents death. Death - "it-has-happened" - is the eidos of photography, and the photographed is its spectrum, because it indicates the return of the dead. Susan Sontag suggests that all photographs are a memento mori, a "pseudopresence and a sign of absence", because they "bear witness to the unrelenting melting of time".

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Goran Bertok has always dealt with the frontier. In his early black-and-white photo series (Omen, 999, Stigmata, I would like to tell you a story), Bertok recorded S&M rituals - the position of a marginalized group and the relations within it; again representing the center (the dominant body) and the margin (the submissive body). The signs which described these relations were indicated by the position of the body - vertical/horizontal, facial expression, as well as body injuries.

Bertok did not show his interest in the body, which is the focal point of his work, via the exploration of the "normal" (prescribed), but rather via the "pathological" (transgressive) bodily experience. Using the body, as a penetrated membrane, to record its non-symbolic value, Bertok virtually limitlessly exhausted, disclosed, and subjected the body to the public view.

What was the supposed way to react to these submissive, injured bodies: should we have identified with the represented or indulged in scopophilia? It seems that Bertok does not allow the viewer the opportunity for masochistic, scopophiliac pleasure, but wants to put him/her in a masochistic, "feminized" position, degrading him/her in front of his/her own picture of banality.

In the current color photo series The Visitors Bertok moves a step further, that is, to the end itself. The body is no more marginalized because it is "pathological", but because it has become a corpse. As Kristeva suggests, the corpse is the reverse of the symbolic, consequently the refuse of civilization. The injured body from the former series has finally been symbolically killed, but at the same time it is really dead. Excluded from the symbolic order, abject and traumatic, The Visitors represent the absolute margin, a retreat, because Bertok does not picture the "sole" representation of the corpse, but a body decomposed through the process of cremation. Portraits of The Visitors represent a real Memento mori iconography, without the (sole) possibility of symbolic death, but through the inevitability of the real.

Bertok's shining portraits seem surreal and are "surreal" because they represent the rejected, the forgotten, the marginal: "an unofficial reality behind the facade of civic life" (Sontag), pointing onto the "pseudopresence and a sign of absence", since "it-has-happened".