On December 9th, three oustanding students will present their Capstone Exhibitions at The American University of Rome.
Sara Rogers, Isabela Alongi, and Amelia McRae, while approaching art in very different ways, all have somethig important to say.
Click on a poster for further information.
The Exhibitions will be followed by Diana Trandafir's (Art History) Thesis Defence "Mental Illness Seen Through The Lens"
Mental illness has been a heavily misunderstood and stigmatized subject, for as long as humanity has existed. Starting from the Middle Ages when people considered that “disease was... punishment for sins, possessions by the devil, or the result of witchcraft” (Ackerknecht, 1968) and continuing until the 19th century when in the United States those suffering from a mental disorder would be “[the mildly affected people] commonly sold at slave auctions, whereas the more violent remained in asylums that were a combination of zoo and penitentiary” (Morrison-Valfre, 5), mental illness was seen as something incurable and dangerous for the healthy society. Instead of the patients being treated and cared for, they were violently hurt, attacked, and subjugated to inhumane 'treatments', which lead to them being dehumanized and seen as 'the others', the 'they' that could destroy 'us' if not locked up and surveilled at all times.
From the moment photography was invented, its documentation function was used by doctors and other practitioners to record the ill and their symptoms to understand the invisible pain that was causing them to suffer and to try to find communality in the patients. One such influential figure was English polymath and father of eugenics Sir Francis Galton, who in the 1870s started experimenting with composite portraiture “in which photographs of different subjects were combined, through repeated limited exposure, to produce a single blended image” (“Francis Galton and Composite Portraiture”) to precisely determine facial features that were signs of a criminal personality, and later in his career signs of mental illness. and 21st century, photography emerged as an art form that allows those that are sick to record their reality and share it with the world, in hopes of sharing their pain and troubles through a visual language that expresses what words cannot describe.
The purpose of this thesis is to examine the role of photography in helping mental illness become a destigmatized topic and in offering the mentally ill and their family and close ones the power to represent their reality and their inner suffering using visual elements. This will be done by examining three case studies: Leonie Hampton's book In the Shadow of Things (2011) where the Hampton records her mother, which is diagnosed with OCD, in her day-to-day life and trying to understand her world and be part of it; Tara Wray's photobook Too Tired for Sunshine (2018) in which the author is both the photographer and the one that is diagnosed with depression and anxiety, capturing the small and often insignificant moments of her life showing how depression can lurk around every corner and steal the simple joy of being outside, feeling the sun on the skin, having a warm cup of tea, or any other pleasant moment; and lastly, Mary Ellen Mark's book Ward 81 (1979/2008) where the photographer is distant from mental illness but fights for the women of a mental asylum to be seen as complex characters that deserve a normal life, outside the bleak walls of an institution that strips them of their privacy and alienates them society.