Could you tell who is a prisoner is and who isn’t? And who, among them has a criminal “face”?
If we knew the identity of these people perhaps the answer would be immediate. This is what we call prejudice, to judge before knowing.
The physical aspect of a person can tell us something about its dangerousness? The founder of Criminal Anthropology, Cesare Lombroso, also asked himself this question. During the second half of the 18th century and the first years of the 19th century he gathered numerous photographs and different materials useful in his opinion to show the connection between the physical features of individuals and their “biological” predisposition to crime; a correlation that has never been proved scientifically.
The collection of photographs of the Museum, used to catalogued thousand of people as “criminals”, what can they tells us today? How do the images that we observe on newspapers, in cinemas, on television influence us? Why do we think that a person’s face is a criminal one?
Starting from these questions the project Face To Face, conceived in 2015, wants to bring attention on people’s faces and the way we look at them. Photographers, experts in communication, the director and the conservator of the Lombroso Museum participated in different talks held in two jails (in the cities of Turin and Saluzzo) to discuss the theme of prejudice with the purpose of promoting integration and awareness.The meetings were organized by the association Sapori Reclusi, born in 2010 from the combination of two passions of the photographer Davide Dutto: food and photography, linked to his personal experiences in the social field.
The photographs exhibited are the result of Davide’s visual research inside the two jails and on the materials of the Museum. Almost to ideally enrich Lombroso’s collection of photographs, these images that portrait men and women, both convicts or free, have been taken on a white background in order to recreate the original setting of some of the photographs of the Museum’s archive. The project Face To Face assigns to these photographs its message against prejudice. Observing these portraits nobody can know “who is who”, and he or she will be forced to make an effort to re-think and re-examine their own way of ” looking” at the world.
“Face To Face. Art against Prejudice“is a project by:
Associazione Culturale Sapori Reclusi – Museo di Antropologia Criminale “Cesare Lombroso”
In collaboration with the following jails:
Casa circondariale “Lorusso e Cotugno” di Torino – Casa di reclusione “Rodolfo Morandi” di Saluzzo
Scientific Coordinators: Silvano Montaldo – Giacomo Giacobini – Cristina Cilli – Giancarla Malerba
Photographs: Davide Dutto
Organization: Manuela Iannetti – Virginia Chiodi Latini
Graphic design: Ghost Associazione Culturale
Display and production: Massimo Venegoni – Angelo Roggero
Translations: Nadia Pugliese
With the contribution of: Fondazione CRT – Crowdfunding Eppela.com