Alex Majoli Knihy

The Greek island of Leros was for 20 years and more the site of the world's most notorious and brutal asylum for the insane. The Magnum photographer Alex Majoli has chronicled its inmates and their return to a sane world and integration into society, the work of the famed Italian psychiatrist Franco Basaglia. Leros raises a number of questions. How could such a regime have existed? And how could anyone have survived it? This book was given the Judges' Special Recognition in the best books category of the International Pictures of the Year Awards 2003 and included in the PDN Photography Annual 2003 in the best books category.

This photographic story is a personal exploration of loss, separation, heaven and hell. Inspired by Pirandellos play Six Characters in Search of an Author , Majoli elaborates on the notion that we are all actors of life . Divided into three chapters; chapter one, Persona, consists of individual black and white photographic portraits, whilst chapter two, Libera Me, is a surrealist composition of Latvian landscapes, with which Majoli explores the idea of paradise. The third chapter, Lacrimosa, is in colour, and emerges from Majolis exploration of the memorials of the genocide in Rwanda, and their associations with the idea of hell. This large format book focuses on the first chapter, Persona. In the twenty portraits only the face is visible, lit with a light that always shines from above, as if it were a divine light. Dramatic in nature, they suggest the notion of judgement, the question of what awaits us after we die and the idea that we are all going to be judged on the day of our death.