The Schube: I’ll get right to the point: There’s a coffee-table book of photos called “Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals,” and it has blown my hair back.
I’d like to recommend it to ya. The pics were shot by an incredibly talented fellow named Christopher Payne. I don’t know him, but wish I did. He has done something rather amazing with a camera lens and a heart.
Now if you’re the type who thinks, “Meh, not for me,” I understand. You’re probably thinking, I don’t want a bunch of pretentious and depressing loony bin pics on my coffee table. Moving on.
No worries. But that’s not at all what this is about.
Mr. Payne has somehow, through a concoction of genuine talent, empathy and – for lack of a better word, wistfulness — managed to capture something that falls smack-dab in the middle of haunting, poetic eloquence and the stark reality that happens when government and medicine enterwine.
This is a a series of photos that reminds us of our humanity, for good or for bad, and often for both.
It would be too easy to turn this short review into a diatribe about the way our society has failed its mentally challenged residents, letting once-thriving state hospitals like these become hollow shells that now stand like ghostly monoliths on the edge of town to breed local boogey-man myths.
That’s all quite true. Yet there’s more to it than that.
There’s rarely a hint of a ghost in Payne’s photos. Nor is there violence: You’ll find no dried blood on the cracked tile, no claw-marks ripping up the padded cell. A row of straight-jackets hanging on a wall conjures all sorts of stereotypical imagery, sure — until another snapshot of a musty room filled with abandoned suitcases reminds us the people who inhabited these buildings were just that…People. Like you and me.
What we get here is layer upon layer of depth, imagination, historical record, visual urban poetry, and art that lays bare the human condition.
Vines snake upward along the concrete walls, pushing through the broken glass and curling over the razorwire that stretches around the asylums. A childlike painting occasionally peeks out among the weeds, waiting for the sunlight to make its face visible. We’re reminded within these pages that we are flawed, and beautiful. And flawed.
Payne’s afterword describes the feeling he had watching one of these old buildings as it was torn down in the name of progress. Within the span of a few hours, we can see how months of construction and years of therapy that took place within these hallways can be turned to dust to make way for…what? A mall? A housing development? A highway? A supercenter?
There are no people in these photos, yet we sense them there in every frame.
We see their bowling shoes, stacked upon each other, collecting spiders and mountains of dust. We see their graffiti, inspired and sincere. The puppets in their craft projects grin with a creepy earnestness. Their dresses and coats, their handmade Christmas decorations — they’re out of fashion, no doubt. But still, they look like something we might have made.
As for the patients and inmates who were treated there… We’re left to wonder what happened to them.
