I’m not a young photographer anymore, I consider myself a so called mid-career author. I feel that I am currently living my sixth life as a photographer (I hope there are several lives, at least nine lives like cats). My previous lives can be summarized as: enthusiastic photographer, photojournalist/news photographer, documentary photographer, concerned photographer, confused photographer and currently we could say a post photographer. I do not deny any of the previous lives, on the contrary I try to treasure past experiences in a constant search for new significant practices and renewed creative processes in and out photography.
My photo book project is about a place and its inhabitants. The place in question is the Leonardo Bianchi Psychiatric Hospital in Naples; one of the largest asylums in southern Italy, the last to be dismantled after the law 180 (the so-called Basaglia law, from the name of the psychiatrist who strongly promoted it and obtained it in 1980) which provided for the progressive closure of the large asylums in favour of smaller and more human territorial structures where the rights and dignity of the internees were respected and promoted.
The process of dismissal of the internees of the Leonardo Bianchi Psychiatric Hospital was very long and troubled; only in 2001 was the hospital definitively closed, a century after its opening.
My project began in 1998 when at my request and in agreement with the director of the institute, an open and enlightened person; I had the opportunity to live for more than a month inside the hospital (in a small room with only a cot, a bedside table and a private bathroom) and I had the opportunity to photograph and document the condition of the last three hundred “guests”, both men and women, who were waiting to be transferred.
I’m talking about people who in most cases had been interned for decades, often for disorders not strictly attributable to psychiatric diseases, such as alcoholism, epilepsy, eating disorders or other personal matters. In short, often people who have not entered, but who have become insane after years of imprisonment and mistreatment.
My experience in this place full of stories, pain, injustices and abuses was very intense. The negatives and photographs of that time remained in a drawer; out of respect for the people I photographed, who at that time were still alive. I have never proposed the pictures for publication, nor in Italy neither abroad; and they remain unknown to this day (with the exception of an exhibition at the Leica Gallery in Solms on the occasion of the 1999 Oskar Barnack Award in which I participated and reached the final).
For twenty years I tried not to think about this work, but periodically and insistently the visions and experiences lived during my stay came back to my mind. Until in 2018 I learned that the immense hospital structure was still standing, although abandoned and in a dilapidated state. I also learned that the hospital archive (which includes 70,000 medical records and one hundred years of practices and history of psychiatry) which was also abandoned, was in danger of disappearing due to neglect, housed in large rooms closed for years at the mercy of humidity ’. So, not without difficulty, I requested and obtained permission to re-photograph the abandoned asylum and work on the archive.
Since 2019 I have therefore returned several times to Naples, more to work on the immense archive, bringing a scanner to record in detail some files, medical records, registers, and when present, old identity photographs of the internees during the years. Recent visits to the archive have been full of surprises; each medical record contains incredible stories, often difficult to decipher, which contain other stories, in a process of discovery that seems endless.
Despite my efforts to limit the incursions into the archive, I have now accumulated a large number of material which, together with the 1998 photographs and the most recent photographs of the abandoned hospital spaces, total around 250 images.
Now it’s a question of drying, eliminating and bringing together the different materials in a coherent form of a photo book.
My photo book project is about a place and its inhabitants. The place in question is the Leonardo Bianchi Psychiatric Hospital in Naples; one of the largest asylums in southern Italy, the last to be dismantled after the law 180 (the so-called Basaglia law, from the name of the psychiatrist who strongly promoted it and obtained it in 1980) which provided for the progressive closure of the large asylums in favour of smaller and more human territorial structures where the rights and dignity of the internees were respected and promoted.
The process of dismissal of the internees of the Leonardo Bianchi Psychiatric Hospital was very long and troubled; only in 2001 was the hospital definitively closed, a century after its opening.
My project began in 1998 when at my request and in agreement with the director of the institute, an open and enlightened person; I had the opportunity to live for more than a month inside the hospital (in a small room with only a cot, a bedside table and a private bathroom) and I had the opportunity to photograph and document the condition of the last three hundred “guests”, both men and women, who were waiting to be transferred.
I’m talking about people who in most cases had been interned for decades, often for disorders not strictly attributable to psychiatric diseases, such as alcoholism, epilepsy, eating disorders or other personal matters. In short, often people who have not entered, but who have become insane after years of imprisonment and mistreatment.
My experience in this place full of stories, pain, injustices and abuses was very intense. The negatives and photographs of that time remained in a drawer; out of respect for the people I photographed, who at that time were still alive. I have never proposed the pictures for publication, nor in Italy neither abroad; and they remain unknown to this day (with the exception of an exhibition at the Leica Gallery in Solms on the occasion of the 1999 Oskar Barnack Award in which I participated and reached the final).
For twenty years I tried not to think about this work, but periodically and insistently the visions and experiences lived during my stay came back to my mind. Until in 2018 I learned that the immense hospital structure was still standing, although abandoned and in a dilapidated state. I also learned that the hospital archive (which includes 70,000 medical records and one hundred years of practices and history of psychiatry) which was also abandoned, was in danger of disappearing due to neglect, housed in large rooms closed for years at the mercy of humidity ’. So, not without difficulty, I requested and obtained permission to re-photograph the abandoned asylum and work on the archive.
Since 2019 I have therefore returned several times to Naples, more to work on the immense archive, bringing a scanner to record in detail some files, medical records, registers, and when present, old identity photographs of the internees during the years. Recent visits to the archive have been full of surprises; each medical record contains incredible stories, often difficult to decipher, which contain other stories, in a process of discovery that seems endless.
Despite my efforts to limit the incursions into the archive, I have now accumulated a large number of material which, together with the 1998 photographs and the most recent photographs of the abandoned hospital spaces, total around 250 images.
Now it’s a question of drying, eliminating and bringing together the different materials in a coherent form of a photo book.