Ivan Stanić

Organ transplantation is among the most invasive procedures modern medicine performs: time-sensitive and ethically charged, while entirely dependent on a single act of donation. One life must end in order for another to get a second chance. For a limited time, life becomes a physical object in motion.

The project was initiated by a long-standing proximity to medicine — a path I once considered before choosing photography — and became a way to enter that world through observation rather than practice. ‘handle with care’ follows an organ transplant team over a course of seven months, documenting strict surgical procedures performed on humans by humans. It is a constructed portrait of a complex environment: from the people sustaining it, to the precision that surgery of this kind demands, to the intricacy of (re)placing an organ into a human body.

This process is a cycle in which the body undergoes a necessary shift: between personhood and clinical handling. The organ becomes the most valuable entity in the room, handled as something that must survive at all costs.

Thermal imaging communicates one of the central concerns: temperature as a physiological condition of preservation. It registers what cannot be seen within surgical procedure but affects the whole process. The preserved organ is kept in cold suspension, while removed tissue may still retain residual warmth. Heat carries symbolic associations with life, but within this system it is decisive as it determines viability and timing, and governs movement between bodies.

Developed under ethical supervision, the work documents a structurally inaccessible system and approaches it from within.