Luciano d'Alessandro - Luciano d'Alessandro - 1969

Book in generally good condition, only a slight stain on the inside of the last two blank pages, see photo, hardcover with dust jacket, 31.5 x 24.5 cm, 118 unnumbered pages. First edition. Minor tears and signs of wear to the dust jacket, otherwise in excellent condition.

Luciano D'Alessandro: The Excluded. Photo-report from a total institution. Il Diaframma, Milan, 1969. Black-and-white photographs by Luciano D'Alessandro. Foreword by Sergio Piro. Graphic design by Michele Ketoff

In 1965 D'Alessandro meets Sergio Piro, director of the Materdomini asylum (Nocera Superiore), a psychiatry professor and one of the protagonists of what would become the democratic psychiatry movement. Piro opens the doors to D'Alessandro, who for three years works to uncover the hallucinatory reality of the total institution. Following this experience, Piro started an open therapeutic community and in 1969 he was dismissed on the basis of the open denunciation of the images produced by D'Alessandro. In the same year the brave Lanfranco Colombo would publish the images in Il Diaframma's editions. Gli esclusi is the first document to support the critique of the asylum system, revealing with powerful images the loneliness of the mentally ill and the violence of the institution.