Jean-Philippe Charbonnier was a French photographer whose works reflect the humanism of the postwar period in France when he worked in photography. While in Switzerland during World War II, he spent two years studying in the studios of White and Demilly, but his photography career was abruptly halted. After returning to France at the end of 1944, he went to work for Liberation and France-Sunday as a typesetter. He was appointed reporter for the magazine Réalités in 1950, specializing in French everyday life and traveling the world for the magazine.
Charbonnier documented several Psychiatric hospitals in the 1950s. Several of these photographs were published in Réalités in January 1955. They highlighted conditions in psychiatric hospitals that still serve as a valuable guide today. Due to the sensitivities of the 1950s, some of the most powerful images were not published.
I stayed six weeks in mental hospitals. The agitator who breaks everything and lives naked in a cell in the soiled straw; the alcoholic on drug treatment, whose vomiting pierces the night and flows materially under his door; women in camisoles, prostrate, desexed and mustachioed who throw themselves to the doctors’ necks.
