Mental, Social and Visual Alienation in D’Alessandro’s Photography

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.