Making Pictures is a reader-supported publication I launched in January 2022. It explores the intersection of photography and psychology, and how these fields blend within the practice of image-making. Over time, the project has evolved to draw on multiple disciplines—part blog, part newsletter, and part living archive.
Together, these notes represent an ongoing attempt to shape a new, transdisciplinary body of knowledge around photography.
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The Observed Body: Reflections on the Clinical Gaze Through Photography
Since its invention, photography has played a pivotal role in various humanistic disciplines. The factual observations captured by experts have contributed to a deeper understanding of nature and society. From a positivist perspective, the camera emerged as a valuable tool for identification and categorization through visual examination.
In particular, photography’s role in the construction of knowledge within psychiatric and biomedical contexts since the 20th century invites critical reflection on both the content it has produced and the modes through which it has been expressed. This opens up a space for reconsidering concepts such as the body, identity, and representation.
Undergraduate thesis submitted for the completion of the Bachelor’s Degree in Psychosocial Studies.
I explore the mind and the body—both as individual experiences and sociocultural constructs. I am an occasional writer: since January 2022 I have been writing and curating Making Pictures, an online publication about photography and psychology.
I’m also interested in visual literacy and photography as a medium of cultural production and exploration.
I live in the Italian Alps with my husband, our daughter, and a wolfdog.
Last Updated 26.09.14
The most photographed woman in the world now lives in the woods. No camera is allowed to point at her since everything that could be taken has already been taken.
Modern medicine is the medicine of the gaze, a way of knowing the body through looking. What, on one hand, is necessary for correct diagnosis and treatment, on the other has the power to relegate the human being to the condition of a passive subject: voiceless, stripped of any knowledge of or say over their own wellbeing and health, an object of a testing industry built around a set of narrowly defined self-concepts.
There are, however, occasions that make it possible to escape the dense web of language and medical intelligence, allowing the human being their own singular, wholly unrepeatable way of narrating themselves.
This work is a collaboration where photography is reconceived not as documentation but as a fabulative apparatus, one capable of activating the real, opening new experiences of health, distress, and care. One that thinks and forms rather than merely representing.
A quiet attempt to escape language itself.
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Men and women, as embodied beings, in their clothes, their shoes, the color of their hair, fully inhabit the material world, vulnerable to an all-seeing, pornographic gaze, a gaze that never wavers, always knows where to linger, and strips them bare.
This photography succumbs to the temptation of reducing being to representation — a domain from which the being escapes, retreating to a space beyond the visible. Thus, the gaze is left disoriented, unsure where to rest.
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A park is a public area that features trees, paths, and benches. It can serve as a garden, playground, or a place for people to congregate.
However, a park can also be seen as a psychological space that encourages social connections and the development of new meanings. By providing a space for community members to come together, parks can foster a sense of empowerment and contribute to community growth.
This work is the outcome of a collaborative five-day artist residency at Villa Angaran San Giuseppe/Atelier F, in Bassano del Grappa (Italy), during the summer of 2023.
The residency focused on exploring the newly renovated green space known as Parco Nord, an urban forest still in the process of growing. With the help of the people who live, work, and visit Villa Angaran, visual traces — in the form of colors, light, and energy — were collected from this new community experience.
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