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

In this article, I compare the strategies of visual representation employed in the two photobooks of 1969 Gli esclusi (D’Alessandro-Piro 1969) and Morire di classe (Berengo Gardin et al. 1969). 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 – through the famous Law 180. I will focus in particular on the representation of claustrophobic spaces in its relationship with the bodies of the inmates and how this relates to the traditional iconography of madness. The aim of this article is to show that, even though they employ radically different strategies of representation, these photobooks aim at translating into visual terms the pivotal philosophical coordinates that guided the reform of psychiatric health care.