Dr. med. Julia Berkei Frankfurt OP — Photo production
Medical photography in Frankfurt: documentation at the practice of Dr. med. Julia Berkei. A documentary set in the operating room of Dr. med. Julia Berkei in…
A documentary set in the operating room of Dr. med. Julia Berkei in Frankfurt. It shows the team at work — loupes with a headlight, sterile blue gowns, gloves, the instrument table, the concentrated look over the field — and stays consistently above the drape.
In an operating room the work dictates the standpoint, not the camera. There are sterile zones you do not enter, routes that have to stay clear, and moments when you do not ask. So the frames were made from a distance with a long lens: what looks like a picture taken from two meters was taken from five.
Staying above the drape is not embarrassed restraint but the right editorial decision. These pictures are not there to document a procedure, they are there to build trust — and that needs faces, hands and concentration, not the surgical field. A patient looking at the website before an operation is looking for the person who will do it.
The light is a contradiction between two sources. The theater lamp is aimed at the field and is orders of magnitude brighter there than the rest of the room; the headlight on the loupes points exactly where the surgeon is looking. The exposure goes on the faces in the half-shadow, and the bright field below is allowed to blow — nothing there is meant to be legible anyway.
Blue and green are the only colors this room knows, and both are difficult for skin tones. Rather than being neutralised they are left standing: an operating room that looks like it is lit for a living room does not read as friendlier, it reads as untrue.
- Doctor
- Dr. Julia Berkei
