Abstract
This chapter analyzes the first of several photobooks that illustrated the reform of psychiatric health care in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s: Luciano D’Alessandro’s 1969 Gli esclusi. In 1967, D’Alessandro was invited by the director of the asylum of Nocera Superiore, Sergio Piro, to document through photography the abysmal conditions of the “total institution” that was the pre-reform mental hospital. D’Alessandro first published a small selection of photos, in Popular Photography Italiana (1967), which he then expanded in Gli esclusi. This chapter claims that, in the evolution between the two publications, we can read the complex and multilayered notion of alienation that informed the work of reform, especially that of one of the most famous figures associated with it, Franco Basaglia. By analyzing D’Alessandro’s Gli esclusi through the notion of alienation, this chapter lets what Sekula calls the conditions of “readability” of the photographic message emerge.
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Change history
10 October 2019
The book was inadvertently published with the given name and family name of the author differently abbreviated in all the chapters as A. S. Tarabochia; whereas it has been updated as A. Sforza Tarabochia.
Notes
- 1.
The hard copy of the book has never been reprinted. A free online scanned version of the book was available until D’Alessandro’s death in 2016. A cached version of the scanned book is available through Archive.org’s “Wayback Machine.” Piro’s presentation is available at https://web.archive.org/web/20090207170253/http://www.lucianodalessandro.com/esclusi/prespiro.html, accessed on August 3, 2018, while the scanned photobook is available at https://web.archive.org/web/20090205174019fw_/http://lucianodalessandro.com:80/esclusi/esclus01.html, accessed on August 3, 2018. The original printed photobook does not have page numbers. For ease of citation I have employed a custom page numbering whereby the first page with a photo is numbered 1. The pages follow sequentially.
- 2.
In 1968 Basaglia invited the photographer Carla Cerati to take pictures in Gorizia and other asylums. Cerati in turn asked Gianni Berengo Gardin to accompany her. A selection of their pictures was initially published by Einaudi in 1969, some months after Gli esclusi, in the photobook Morire di classe: La condizione manicomiale fotografata, edited by Basaglia and his wife, Franco Ongaro (Basaglia and Ongaro 1969).
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Sforza Tarabochia, A. (2019). Mental, Social, and Visual Alienation in D’Alessandro’s Photography. In: Diazzi, A., Sforza Tarabochia, A. (eds) The Years of Alienation in Italy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15150-8_11
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