Good morning, my name is Alvise Sforza Tarabochia and I am a lecturer in Italian at the University of Kent. Today I would like to talk about my current research project, which is to establish significant connections between photography and psychiatry within the national context of Italy and, in particular, I would like to talk about early Italian psychiatric photography and how it was used to make madness visible. 

During the second half of the 19th century Italy was becoming a unified country and at the same time psychiatry was profoundly anti- spiritualistic and anti-psychologistic to the point that, in fact, it was called the freniatria in Italy explicitly to avoid the root psyche that signified the soul. It had a materialistic and positive approach, mental disorders were regarded as pathologies of the brain and as Carlo Livi put it, Carlo Livi the founder of the freniatria italiana microscope and experimentation in accordance with clinical observation are the three pillars of freniatria. However, physiopathological and anatamopathological studies proved very inconclusive, at least as far as psychiatry is concerned, and did not translate at all into an effective clinical practice. Freniatria remained practiced behind the closed door of the asylum and mental disorders were no closer to be treated. The main concern of Italian freniatria in fact was not to progress the discipline but on the contrary it was to pass a unified law to uniform, to homogenise the practice of psychiatry across the country and to pass a law on asylums, which arrived only in 1904 more than half a century after other major European countries. 

In the meantime, psychiatry struggled to establish itself as a medical discipline and mainly for two reasons, one is struggle to give visibility to its object, to mental disorders and on the other hand is the struggle to give visibility to its clinical practice. As a matter in fact it was practised behind the doors of the asylum. Photography in both cases came to the rescue and it took two different forms, one that we might expect and one that might be more unexpected. Of course we have individual and group portraits of patients but on the other hand we also have environmental and architectural photography of the facilities that was used to advertise the orderly practice of psychiatry. One of the main outlets of psychiatric photography were the medical records, although a consistent application of photography to the individual medical records started only in in the 1910s before that there was not even a specific place where to put a photograph in the template for the medical record. These were cross-referenced with photographic admission or discharge registers, here we have an example from the Venice female asylum in San Clemente where the individual photograph of the patient was captioned with the name of the patient and the number, the order of admission. Sometimes these took the form of diagnostic albums along with the name and date of admission, there was the diagnosis of the patient; here we have an example from the asylum, the San Lazzaro asylum in Reggio Emilia. These were very helpful to support physiognomic theories that is to say theories that associated exterior traits such as facial expressions or facial characteristics or shapes of the skull to inner traits be them behavioural traits normal or abnormal such as in mental disorders. Then we have the comparative albums this is an example from Venice male asylum in San Servolo, comparative albums are a rather unique case in Venice they presented a picture of the patient upon admission and a picture of the patient upon discharge for comparison. All of these show upon admission patients that are dishevelled, unkempt, ungroomed, their gaze wanders confusedly outside of the frame, sometimes there are signs of coercion, hands of the nurses hold the patient's in front of the camera. The pictures upon discharge on the contrary feature very orderly patients, very well-groomed people, looking intently at the camera, self-assured. They show the power of the institution as a healing power, as a healing power that could return order to the chaos that madness brought. 

While these images were meant to remain within the asylum, sometimes they were used also for illustration purposes during conferences or lectures. This is the case for instance of Carolina Rosi's picture. She was admitted to San Lazzaro in Reggio Emilia in 1886 after having murdered her three daughters. She was diagnosed with lipemania a synonym of melancholia. On her case Tamburini wrote the medical legal expertise and a paper. In the archives we can also find four portraits of her well-framed and captioned, Tamburini most likely used them in lectures and perhaps he even brought them with him at the Exposition Universelle in 1900 when he presented the San Lazzaro asylum in Reggio Emilia as a model institution for psychiatry. On this occasion Tamburini commissioned professional photographer Giuseppe Fantuzzi to document the daily life inside the asylum these are some examples of pictures taken by Fantuzzi, they show a histological lab, a drawing school for the inmates, they show the inmates practising outdoors activities and so forth. That is to say they show a scientific practice inside the asylum, they show that psychiatry was practised as a medical discipline, as a science and they also show that the patients were entertained and they could heal, they could recover by means of outdoor activities and other significant activities. 

Since it's very inception psychiatry had been practised behind the closed doors and behind the walls of the asylum and it has always elicited a very strong, at times morbid, curiosity. One example for in Bethlem Hospital, better known as bedlam, in London people could pay a shilling to visit the wards and look at insane raving as if it were a zoo. Photography was used in an attempt to bridge the gap and to make institutional and clinical practice visible - to show what was happening inside the sanctum of psychiatric practice. At the same time psychiatry was practised inside the head as opposed to other branches of Medicine. In an era when the clinic was born according to Foucault and with it a certain medical gaze, a certain way of looking at the body, trying to look inside the body, trying to find the illness within the organs, within the tissues, within the cells, trying to make illness visible and that's treatable, in such an era psychiatry struggled to define itself as a medical practice because its object was, by and large, invisible. Photography was one of the workarounds that psychiatry found. On the one hand, it attempted with more traditional medical practices such as an anatamopathology, using brain dissection and histological studies to understand the nervous system, studies that proved very important for the advancement in neurology but did very little for the progress of psychiatry but on the other hand psychiatry looked at more creative workarounds, the old art of physiogomics and phrenology which were pseudo-sciences that tried to associate exterior traits with interior traits. In conclusion photography allowed to gather visual data, it allowed to gather and stockpile visual data in order for it to be compared, to be used as an object. Psychiatry used photography to make madness visible and also to make its clinical practice visible to the wider public. 
Thank you very much