With Invisible No More, Pietropaolo presents a moving photographic chronicle of more than 100 dynamic images and 30 evocative stories of people with intellectual disabilities: those who may have been born with Down syndrome, autism, or who are “otherwise abled.”

For too long people with intellectual disabilities have been shut out of most societies around the world, or more accurately, they have been shut in—forcibly confined in mental institutions, quietly hidden inside their families’ homes, isolated from public view as much as possible, and prevented from achieving the full potential to which that any human being inherently has a right. Invisible No More rights this wrong.

Words and images from the heart of Vincenzo Pietropaolo …

“ When I began to work on Invisible No More, I truly had no idea of the intense involvement in people’s lives that it would entail. To make the pictures, collect interviews, and simply spend time with people informally, I visited forty towns, cities, and villages across Canada. I broke bread—sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively—with over one hundred families and individuals in their homes and workplaces, in parks and schools, in shopping centresand places of worship from coast to coast to coast.

“But it was much more than a journey across the land. It was a journey through a terrifyingly beautiful human landscape, a sea of humanity known as the disability community. Everyone needed to tell a story, everyone needed to have someone listen… and in so doing, begin to cast away the shackles of silence in which they have lived with for so many years.”

Invisible No More is a uniquely original book that combines photographs and creative nonfiction, two narrative forms designed and sequenced to thread seamlessly into each other, absorbing the reader intimately into the lives of the people portrayed. Pietropaolo has often said that his books are like “films on paper.”

The Canadian Medical Association Journal said, “Pietropaolo has an ability to penetrate into these intimate worlds without any sense of aggression or intrusion…with a sensitivity that is profoundly moving.”

The Toronto Star said, “This remarkable photo essay tells gripping stories of disabled people… [taking them] out of darkness.”

Foreword by Wayne Johnston, Canadian novelist.

Introductory essay by Catherine Frazee, Professor of Distinction in Disability Studies, Ryerson University.

Essay and texts by Vincenzo Pietropaolo

Hardcover, with dust jacket, 103 photographs in colour and black and white, 150 pages.

Publisher: Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey and London, 2010. ISBN 978–0–8135–4768–8