Alex Majoli’s Leros is not an Aegean island study in the picturesque sense. Published by Trolley Books in 2002, the book confronts the history of the psychiatric institution with which Leros became closely identified. Thousands of patients were transferred there from across Greece, many after other hospitals had abandoned their cases. They were confined in a former military base that had previously served as a prison for political detainees.

Majoli’s photographs chronicle the institution’s inmates and the effort to return them to life beyond the asylum. The project therefore encompasses both a system of extreme confinement and the difficult process of social reintegration, linked to the reforming psychiatric principles associated with Franco Basaglia. Its central questions are historical and ethical: how such conditions were permitted to endure, what survival meant within them, and what freedom could mean afterward.

The book’s distinction lies in this sustained attention to transition. It does not leave the people of Leros fixed within the identity imposed on them by the institution; nor does it allow reform to erase the preceding history. By holding institutional abuse and its aftermath within one photographic account, Majoli makes the asylum legible not as an isolated aberration but as a structure involving medical authorities, the island community, and the wider society that sent people there.

At 112 pages, the hardcover volume gives concentrated form to a subject in which place, confinement, and personhood are inseparable. For collectors of documentary photography and socially engaged photobooks, Leros deserves attention for the way it preserves a specific institutional history while resisting a simple before-and-after narrative. It is a book about an asylum, but more precisely about the lives that an asylum attempted to define—and the uncertain passage beyond that definition.