From Sept. 13 through Oct. 8, the Zuckerman Museum of Art’s gallery held an exhibition featuring photographer Christopher Payne’s series entitled “Asylum.”
Over the span of six years, Payne visited 70 institutions in 30 states.
The exhibition features a special selection of photographs from Payne’s series, photographing as he states, “palatial exteriors designed by famous architects and crumbling interiors that appeared as if the occupants had just left,” according to an information graphic posted in the exhibit.
Additionally, he also “documented how the hospitals functioned as self-contained cities, where almost everything of necessity was produced on site…[s]ince many of these places have been demolished, the photographs serve as their final, official record.”
In an interview with Business Insider he stated, “For this project, my goal was to reconstruct a typical state hospital in its heyday, when it functioned as a self-sufficient community, it was impossible to find one hospital with everything intact, but by juxtaposing a photograph of a theater from one hospital, a morgue from another, a bowling alley from a third, and so on, an entire institution could be recreated.”
Many of the hospitals were eager to share their history. Payne got exclusive tours from people who used to work in them.
“Many of the [former] employees had worked at the institutions for decades, as had their parents and grandparents before them, and they were proud of their work,” Payne said.
Speaking of the project on his website, he adds that “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, more than 250 institutions for the insane were built throughout the United States. By 1948, they housed over half a million patients. Over the next thirty years, with the introduction of psychotropic drugs and policy shifts toward community-based care, patient populations declined dramatically, leaving many of these massive buildings neglected and abandoned.”
Payne specializes in architectural and industrial photography. Trained as an architect, he is fascinated by design, assembly and the built form. When asked about his goal for this series, he stated, “In doing so, I hope my photographs convey the value these hospitals once had in society by showing how they functioned and by making palpable the architectural history we have lost.”
The Zuckerman Museum invites anyone interested to come to see the exhibits they have on display.
Currently in the museum are the exhibits “Recollections Oscar Muñoz” and “The Gravity of Beauty,” both running from Aug. 27 through Dec. 10.
For more information, visit the Zuckerman Museum of Art website or visit from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays or noon to 5 p.m. on Sundays.
