Typical Ward, Kankakee State Hospital, Kankakee, Illinois, 2007.
Asylum. The word conjures chilling visions of illness and suffering, a place of refuge and quarantine for those who have lost their minds. It is not simply the horror of insanity that cools the blood but the very institution itself that provokes a feeling of horror and dread. As psychology became established as a scientific discipline and a medical practice in the mid-nineteenth century, vast mental hospitals began springing up across the United States.
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By 1948 more than half a million patients were living in the 250 institutions had been built. Many of these buildings were grand, palatial affairs. Some facilities could house 10,000 patients. Pennsylvania hospital superintendent Thomas Story Kirkbride set the blueprint as for the institutions as a central administration building flanked symmetrically by pavilions and surrounded by lavish grounds with pastoral vistas. Here, out of public view, the mentally ill could live in vast, village-like facilities, complete with movie theaters, hairdressing salons, bowling alleys and vegetable gardens. It was believed that good architecture and landscape design, a peaceful environment and regiment of work, exercise, activities, and fresh air would cure mental illness. That was, until psychotropic drugs were introduced. Over the next three decades, policy shifts toward community-based care, patient populations declined dramatically, leaving many of these buildings and the patients who lived in them neglected and abandoned.
Straightjacket, Logansport State Hospital, Logansport, Indiana, 2007
Architect and photographer Christopher Payne spent six years documenting what remains of state mental hospitals. He explains, “From 2002 to 2008, I visited seventy institutions in thirty states, photographing palatial exteriors designed by famous architects and crumbling interiors that appeared as if the occupants had just left. I also documented how the hospitals functioned as self-contained cities, where almost everything of necessity was produced on site: food, water, power, and even clothing and shoes. Since many of these places have been demolished, the photographs serve as their final, official record.”
A selection of the photographs is currently on view in Christopher Payne: Asylum at Benrubi Gallery, New York, now through March 26, 2016. Since his visits, many of these institutions have since been demolished. In many ways, Payne’s photographs are their final appearance in the historical record, and it is clear from his perspective there’s a reverence that lingers in the air. Payne observes, “We tend to think of mental hospitals as ‘snake pits’—places of nightmarish squalor and abuse—and this is how they have been portrayed in books and film. Few Americans, however, realize these institutions were once monuments of civic pride, built with noble intentions by leading architects and physicians, who envisioned the asylums as places of refuge, therapy, and healing.”
Patient Toothbrushes, Hudson River State Hospital, Poughkeepsie, New York, 2005
Payne’s photographs are quiet, thoughtful, and tender affairs, private meditations on life as it had once been designed in a pre-pharmaceutical era. The images are romantic, sensitive, and carefully composed, invoking a sense of the spiritual realm. Payne’s photographs invoke a deep feeling of safety, nurturing, and intimacy, reminding us of architecture’s uncanny ability to embody an ethereal realm.
Photos: ©Christopher Payne/Courtesy of Benrubi Gallery, NYC
Miss Rosen is a New York-based writer, curator, and brand strategist. There is nothing she adores so much as photography and books. A small part of her wishes she had a proper library, like in the game of Clue. Then she could blaze and write soliloquies to her in and out of print loves.
