Those Who Have Lived, published by 5 Continents Editions in 2011, presents Simone Casetta’s photographs of anatomical specimens preserved at the Eugenio Morelli anatomical museum in Rome’s Carlo Forlanini hospital. The project, photographed in 2003–2004, approaches these remains not simply as scientific objects but as portraits: records of bodies once animated, now held in suspension between evidence, memory, and representation.
That shift in address is central to the book’s force. Casetta’s subject is medical and archival, yet the images invite a more personal form of looking. The specimens retain the marks of classification and preservation, while the photographic act grants them a distinct presence. Their silence is not sentimentalized; instead, the book asks how a body can continue to signify after life, and how institutions shape what is remembered, displayed, and seen.
The volume is also a collaboration of image and text. Texts by John Berger and Henri Peyre accompany Casetta’s photographs, extending their questions about the body, memory, and the act of looking. With 35 colour illustrations across 116 pages, the English-language hardcover gives the work a considered editorial frame in which sequence, scale, and the encounter between photographs and writing become part of its meaning.
For collectors, the book deserves attention as a focused meeting of documentary photography, anatomical history, and literary reflection. Its distinctive achievement lies in transforming a specialized museum collection into a sustained meditation on portraiture and the afterlife of the human body, while preserving the tension between clinical fact and the individuality that a portrait implies.
