signed by both photographers

Morire di Classe is a collaboration between photographers Carla Cerati and Gianni Berengo Gardin, Franco Basaglia, a radical and charismatic psychiatrist and neurologist and Basaglia's wife, Franca. The experimental design and sequencing of the photographs, which were taken in 1968 at three psychiatric hospitals in Colorno (near Parma), Goriza, and Florence, help to expose the conditions of Italian psychiatric institutions.
An ideology that saw asylums as prisons drove Franco Basaglia. He developed an alternative plan for community clinics, which he implemented upon taking over the directorship of the mental hospital in Trieste in 1971. His movement of democratic psychiatry attracted many followers. Trieste served as an example, and in 1978, a law was passed that would lead to widespread reform of the Italian mental health system and the phasing out of asylums such as those featured in Morire di Classe.

First edition, signed by both photographers; (181 x 238 mm, 7¼ x 9¼ in); black & white photographs by Gianni Berengo Gardin and Carla Cerati, text by Franco Basaglia and Franca Basaglia Ongaro, edited by Franca Basaglia Ongaro; purple wrappers, printed in red on upper and to lower side in black, light wear to extremities, crease to upper corner, light fading to upper top edge and fore-edge, and to lower top edge and toward spine, reading crease and fading to spine; [88]pp.

The Photobook: A History II, p246; 802 Photo Books from the M+M Auer Collection 508; What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women pp182-183.