Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals
Asylum: Surrounded by the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals Books
Product Description
Winner, 2010 Ken Book Award presented by the National Alliance on Mental Illness of New York City Metro (NAMI-NYC Metro).
“Payne is a visual poet as well as an architect by training, and he has spent years finding and photographing these buildings—often the pride of their local communities and a powerful symbol of humane caring for those less fortunate. His photographs are gorgeous images in their own aptly, and they also pay tribute to a sort of broadcast architecture that no longer exists. They focus both on the monumental and the mundane, the grand facades and the coming off paint.”
—Oliver Sacks, Asylum
For more than half the nation’s history, vast mental hospitals were a prominent feature of the American landscape. From the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth, over 250 institutions for the insane were built throughout the United States; by 1948, they housed more than a half million patients. The blueprint for these hospitals was set by Pennsylvania sickbay superintendant Thomas Tale Kirkbride: a central administration building flanked symmetrically by pavilions and surrounded by lavish grounds with pastoral vistas. Kirkbride and others believed that well-calculated buildings and grounds, a peaceful environment, a regimen of fresh air, and places for work, exercise, and cultural activities would heal mental illness. But in the second half of the twentieth century, after the introduction of psychotropic drugs and policy shifts toward community-based care, patient populations declined dramatically, leaving many of these gorgeous, massive buildings—and the patients who lived in them—neglected and abandoned.
Architect and photographer Christopher Payne spent six years documenting the decay of state mental hospitals like these, visiting seventy institutions in thirty states. Through his lens we see splendid, palatial exteriors (some calculated by such prominent architects as H. H. Richardson and Samuel Sloan) and breakdown interiors—chairs stacked hostile to walls with coming off paint in a grand hallway; brightly colored toothbrushes still hanging on a rack; stacks of suitcases, never packed for the trip home.
Accompanying Payne’s striking and powerful photographs is an essay by Oliver Sacks (who described his own experience working at a state mental sickbay in his book Awakenings). Sacks pays tribute to Payne’s photographs and to the lives once lived in these places, “where one may possibly be both mad and safe.”
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The book is gorgeous but there is a lot of empty space in the book which left me dissatisfied.
Numerous Blank Pages raise the question was the book proofed before publishing and if so what is the intent of a page being part of the page numbering sequence of the book but having nothing on it.
Is there any explanation for all the blank pages amongst the photos?
Additionally, I found the book to be as empty in content as some of the pictures described the places the author visited. The inclusion of an essay doesn’t make it a typical coffee table photography book and certainly leads into the pictures and provides background. The essay tries to convey the tale of these places and with that being said I felt that each picture may possibly have used a small description and/or anecdote. Instead of just a photograph with a mark stating where each picture was taken I feel the reader would have loved a small background on the picture presented. Whether it be a description or history of something in the photograph or a small history on the sickbay I felt that was something needed to keep me really into the book instead of just quickly turning the pages. If there was something there with the photography to read the book would have been much more of an experience for the reader.
Rating: 2 / 5
A haunting, awkward book to read. The extraordinary photographs complementary to the text offer a contextual glimpse into mental hospitals, which honorably started as “asylums.” The deplorable decline that transformed such havens into virtual prisons utilized to experiment with and medicate its patients into submission is very different from its dignified beginnings. For those who found daily life overwhelming, it was an accessible, inviolable refuge and a peaceful shelter. A safe sanctuary, which brought to mind a line in Yeats’ poem (The Stolen Child), “…for the world’s more full of crying than you can know…”
Rating: 5 / 5
At first I was really surprised at the size of this book, it was larger than I had expected, especially for the price. It is well constructed and place together very nicely. It is mainly a photography book, so don’t guess tons of history about the buildings, but he does have enough info. to give someone the basics on asylums. One part I like especially was at the beginning he has quite a few historical postcards and photos of asylums. The next 95% of the book is his photographic essay that is presented in a way that gives the reader a nice overview of a typical asylum using photos from 50-70 different individual asylums. He does a fantastic job at capturing both the rich history as well as the more recent neglect of these fantastic buildings.
Rating: 5 / 5
That book is wonderful! The pictures really capture the being alone and alienation of a patient diagnosed with mental illness.
And the essay by Oliver Sacks is very informative and fascinating.
I strongly urge it to anyone who is fascinated with asylums.
Rating: 5 / 5
These words used by Oliver Sacks in the foreword make perfect sense when viewing these photographs by Christopher Payne. I loved the foreword, as it paints a picture of what these institutions were supposed to be, not just what they’ve become. Without such an introduction, the impact of these images is not fully realized. As much as I know you’ll want to skip ahead, I urge reading the foreword first, it’s worth it in the end.
The words “asylum” and “mental sickbay” don’t conjure up the most comforting of thoughts. These places have been the setting for so many horror flicks and books that we instinctively go there in our minds upon hearing their name. But this book does not described them in such a light. If there is any disturbance, it’s our own head imagining us being there, not anything intentionally frightening about the pictures. The images range from documentary to breathtaking. There are a lot of images here, more than I plotting would be when I bought the book. Although I am a huge fan of black and white, the color photographs are what impressed me the most, especially the interiors. I can only reckon to describe the tone as cool, yet peaceful.
This book is well worth it.
Rating: 5 / 5