Paper short abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork (with camera) in a dementia center in Italy, in this paper I propose the concept of carescope as a heuristic tool to explore the politics of seeing and being seen which shaped local care relations and ultimately led to the production of positive dementia imagery.

Paper long abstract:

Overtly positive images of dementia (care) are usually considered problematic because they tend to marginalize suffering and compassion fatigue which often characterizes life with this condition. In this paper I seek to problematize this view by highlighting relational and performative aspects of positive dementia imagery. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork (with camera) in a dementia respite center in North Italy, I explore the politics of seeing and being seen which shaped local care relations, including my own camera negotiations. I argue that it was these politics that ultimately led to the production of images which downplayed certain difficult aspects of care and life with dementia. Building on the literature on training attention as well as the local concept of 'fare bella figura' (‘to make good impression’), I discuss what positive images did and what image-makers and image-viewers did with them in my field site location.

This situated analysis of images as agents of care leads me to argue for the notion of carescope (scopein in Greek: ‘to look’), a heuristic tool which allows to be more attentive to variety of ways in which care and seeing are intermingled in different contexts and cultural settings. This theoretical stance is also an attempt to contribute to the emerging – although not yet consolidated – field of visual/multimodal anthropology of care (Pieta and Sokolovsky 2023) - seeking to break away from the tendency, still dominant in anthropological scholarship on care, to treat images as mere representations and vision as an instrument of (biomedical) surveillance.