Christopher Payne takes us back to when mental illness was even less understood than it is today in his pictures of former asylums taken between 2002 and 2008. These vast architectural relics cast sinister shadows on the modern human psyche. That was then, we tell ourselves. And it as awful. But an asylum is a refuge. It offers sanctuary and a safe place to be different. The Oxford English Dictionary says an asylum is “a benevolent institution according shelter and support to some class of the afflicted, the unfortunate, or destitute.” Payne’s pictures show us the afterlife of once thriving buildings, vital and hulking parts of America’s mental health industry.
-Flashbak
