Carescopes: On Caring, Looking at and Becoming

In this paper, I focus on those images of dementia (care) which have been, or might be, deemed overtly positive, because they tend to marginalize suffering, decline and compassion fatigue. I argue for the notion of carescope, a heuristic tool which on one hand allows me to see caring and seeing as related to each other and which on the other brings to center stage the situated, relational, performative and sensorial aspects of images and care. Rather than conceptualizing images as mere representations offered to us to contemplate, I draw on my ethnographic fieldwork in a dementia respite center in North Italy to explore what images are in the localized context of care, what they do and what the image-makers and viewers do with them.