Salvatore Mancini

In this series, photographer Salvatore Mancini captures two distinct emotions: joy and despair. Like the prints at right, these photos focus on a Rhode Island mental-health institution, although Mancini’s work was made 20 years after Mazur’s. Within that time period, there was a shift in the US from institutionalization to community-based care. For every 100 people institutionalized in Rhode Island in 1955, only 2 people are institutionalized today. While this shift has presented its own set of complications in the treatment of people with mental illness, these photographs by Mancini bear witness to that change.