Recuperandi

“The prisoner is an immense mystery and, in the face of any mystery, our first attitude should be to kneel and humbly admit that we know nothing, and that before us is a new world to discover.”

-Mario Ottoboni

I began my thesis with this quote by Mario Ottoboni (founder of the APAC) because it reminded me to approach the people and the reality I was about to encounter with openness and curiosity.

My project, Recuperandi, became a photographic book about the Comunità Educante con i Carcerati (CEC) [Educational Community with Inmates] in Italy. But before it became a book, it began with a question:

What does it really mean to look at a person without reducing them to their mistake?

My interest in alternative approaches to incarceration had started years earlier. In high school, I watched Unguarded, a 2022 documentary film directed by Simonetta D’Italia Wiener that explores APAC (Association for the Protection and Assistance of Convicts), a revolutionary restorative justice-based prison system in Brazil. I was struck by an idea of incarceration that was very different from the one I had always known. A sentence could involve true responsibility, work, relationships, education and the possibility of change. Years later, I encountered CEC during an exhibit and had the opportunity to speak with some of the people participating in the program. That encounter transformed an initial curiosity into a desire to understand the experience from within.

The CEC model is inspired by the Brazilian APAC experience. Rather than defining a person only by the crime they committed, it places the person and their journey at the center. Within the community, the people serving their sentences are called recuperandi — not a person who has already been “recovered, ” but one who is on a journey, who is walking towards recovery.

I had the opportunity to work on this project directly within the community and with the recuperandi. This spring I spent a week living in one of the CEC houses near Rimini, Italy. When I arrived, one of the men gave me a tour around the house and explaining the proposal they follow in depth, after the tour he then took me to the room that had been prepared for me. It had been cleaned and arranged for my arrival. He handed me the keys and, as he left, said: “Take your time. Whenever you want to come downstairs, we’ll be down working.”

It was a small gesture, but it changed the way I entered the community. I had not arrived simply as an outside observer coming to photograph people serving a sentence. I had entered a home with a warm welcome.

Before I could photograph, I had to learn this space.

I shared meals, work and everyday activities with the people there. I learned the daily schedule, their habits, their silences and their boundaries. I did not want to create curated situations for the camera. I wanted to follow the reality that was already there and photograph what struck me. And it was in these ordinary moments that I began to understand and get to know the person I was meeting in a different way.One evening, we were cutting vegetables to prepare burritos for dinner when Davide (made up name) turned to me.

“Maria, do you think I would make a good impression if I cooked this dinner for a future girlfriend?”

“Of course, ” I told him.

“If you can prepare all of this yourself, you’ll make a great impression.”

A few minutes later, he stopped and added:

“How beautiful would it be one day to prepare this dinner with my children.”

Another day, one of the men who in the community cares for a disabled person told me:

“In work and in caring for others, I discovered that I have a good and patient side which I didn’t know I had.”

When I asked him what he wanted to do when he left the community, he told me that he wants to return to his mother, who is ill, and take care of her. She struggles even to climb the stairs on her own.

These were simple conversations, but they stayed with me. They made visible something that can easily disappear when we speak about incarceration only in terms of crime and punishment: the person who committed a crime is still a person with relationships, responsibilities, hopes and a future.

The experience also changed the way I photographed. I did not want to create dramatic images of people who had made mistakes, or reproduce the stereotypes we often associate with prison.

I wanted to photograph everyday life: work, relationships, ordinary gestures, moments of silence.

One man in the community did not want his face photographed. At first, I thought this might be a limit in the project. Instead, it taught me something important. One day, while he was preparing an artichoke, he turned toward me and opened his hand showing me the beautiful shapes and colors of an artichoke. I photographed that hand. That image became one of the most meaningful photographs of the project. Respecting his choice had not made the work less complete. It made it more honest, more true to the person i had in front of me.

I began to understand that ethical photography is not only about obtaining permission. It is about how we choose to remain in front of another person — with closeness, but also with discretion. Attentive but not possessive.

During the week, I also noticed small expressions that revealed something about the culture of the community. After someone said “thank you,” another person would often respond,

“No, thank you!” They would repeat it back and forth, sometimes jokingly.

After a few days, I found myself saying it too. It was a small exchange, but underneath the joke I sensed something deeper: a recognition that nothing should be taken for granted. Thankfulness itself could become part of everyday life.

The process I was witnessing was not about erasing the past or pretending that the harm caused did not exist. It was about confronting it, taking responsibility, and allowing the possibility of something new to grow.

But perhaps the sentence that changed me most was one I encountered during my research:

“There is no sin that one person can commit that another person is not capable of committing.”

I did not read this as an attempt to excuse wrongdoing. Instead, it forced me to look at myself.

It reminded me that the distance between “us” and “them” is not as absolute as we might like to believe. I began to recognize in myself the same fundamental need that I was seeing in the people around me: the need to be seen as more than our worst moment, to be loved despite our failures, to take responsibility for what we have done, and to have the possibility of changing, of encountering a truth that I with my limits can follow.That realization became central to my thesis. My goal was never to provide a complete answer about incarceration. I do not want to deny the harm caused or create an idealized picture of the community. I want to shift the gaze — from the crime alone to the whole person, and toward the possibility of encountering a more complex reality. This is also why I chose to make a book. A book asks the reader to slow down. To stop. To look at one image, then another, and allow them to exist together without immediately providing an answer.

Looking back, I realize that my thesis was never only about prison, or the CEC, or even photography. It was about learning how to look, how to be attentive, how to look at the whole of a person.

And that is something I continue to carry with me as I encounter the work of AVSI-USA with the Restorative Freedom Initiative in the United States. The contexts are different, but the question remains deeply familiar: What becomes possible when we refuse to define a person only by the worst thing they have done?

My thesis began with questions about incarceration. It ended with a conviction: a person is always greater than their mistake.

Before I could tell someone else’s story, I had to learn to look beyond the sentence — and to recognize the person who is still there, with a past to take responsibility for and a future that is good and possible.

Maria Stohlman

Photo Gallery: