Claustrophobic Visions of the Asylum: The Photobooks of the Italian Psychiatric Reform

Abstract

In this article, I compare the strategies of visual representation employed in the two 1969 photobooks Gli esclusi (D’Alessandro-Piro) and Morire di classe (Berengo Gardin et al.). These photobooks have been the photographic protagonists of the reform of psychiatric health care that, fed by the upheavals of the late 1960s, brought about the closure of psychiatric asylums in 1978 thanks to the famous Law 180. I will specifically focus on the representation of claustrophobic spaces in their relationship with the bodies of inmates compared to the traditional iconography of madness. This article aims to show that these photobooks (while employing radically different strategies of representation) aim at providing a visual translation of the pivotal philosophical coordinates that guided the reform of psychiatric health care.

Keywords

• Photobook
• Asylum
• Psychiatry
• Photojournalism
• Italy
• Madness