In 1977, Raymond Depardon met Franco Basaglia, director of the psychiatric hospital in Trieste and a leading figure in Italy’s alternative psychiatry movement. Basaglia and his colleagues were then working to dismantle the asylum system, a campaign that culminated in the passage of Law 180 in 1978. At a time when more than 100,000 people were confined in psychiatric institutions across Italy, Basaglia urged Depardon to photograph what was happening so that its reality could not later be denied.

With Basaglia’s assistance, Depardon gained access to hospitals in Trieste, Venice, Naples, Arezzo and Turin. He continued photographing for four years, through the closure of the hospital on San Clemente, the island near Venice. The resulting body of work belongs to a precise political and institutional moment, but it is not simply an adjunct to reform history. Depardon approached these hospitals as places of suffering whose conditions, inhabitants and structures required a durable visual memory.

The photographs did not immediately become a book. Depardon released his film on San Clemente in 1982, yet waited roughly three decades before editing and designing the photographic work. Published by Steidl in 2014, the 208-page volume therefore brings two periods into contact: the urgency of photographs made amid institutional change and the retrospective judgment involved in shaping them much later. Because Depardon himself directed the book’s design, its form is integral to his reconsideration of the archive rather than a neutral container for earlier images.

For a serious photobook collection, Manicomio: Secluded Madness warrants attention for this convergence of documentary access, psychiatric history and authorial bookmaking. Its importance rests neither on spectacle nor on claims of scarcity, but on the sustained witness of a photographer working alongside a consequential reform movement—and on the unusual interval between taking the pictures and determining their final sequence and form.