title: Photography and radical psychiatry in Italy in the 1960s. The case of the photobook Morire di Classe (1969).
abstract: In the 1960s Franco Basaglia, the Director of a Psychiatric Hospital in a small city on the edge of Italy (Gorizia), began to transform that institution from the inside. He introduced patient meetings and set up a kind of Therapeutic Community. In 1968 he asked two photographers - Carla Cerati and Gianni Berengo Gardin - to take photos inside Gorizia and other asylums. These images were then used in a photobook called Morire di Classe (To Die Because of your Class) (1969). This article re-examines in detail the content of this celebrated book and its history, and its impact on the struggle to reform and abolish large-scale psychiatric institutions. It also places the book in its social and political context and as a key text of the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s.
authors.affiliation: University of Bristol j.foot@bristol.ac.uk.
authors.forename: John
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Foot
mesh_terms: D001878:Books, Illustrated / Q000266:history*; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006778:Hospitals, Psychiatric / Q000266:history*; D006801:Humans; D007558:Italy; D008488:Medical Illustration / Q000266:history; D010781:Photography / Q000266:history*; D011570:Psychiatry / Q000266:history*
keywords: Antipsychiatry; Franco Basaglia; Italy; photography; psychiatric reforms