If my heart could speak,
I’m sure it would say, I wish I were
someplace else today.
Among these books, a great amount of knowledge there must be,
but what good is knowledge where others carry the keys. (201)
These lines are from a poem written by an unnamed (probably unknown) patient on the wall of a basement in Augusta State Hospital in Maine. The first line in blue, the rest in red, the words are large and neat with idiosyncratically placed capitals. Christopher Payne has placed this photograph at the end of the main section of his images in Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals, just before his own afterword. It’s like the final statement on the treatment of mental illness, a combination of acknowledgement that things have improved, but that much remains to be done. Payne’s enabled one of the former patients to have their say, albeit indirectly, after both he, his camera, and Oliver Sacks have spoken for them.
This is a truly beautiful and haunting book, Payne’s skill with the camera evident in nearly 200 pages of photographs of asylums, showing their massive exteriors and some more intimate interior spaces, along with the farms, dairies, gazebos and cemeteries of their surroundings. He shows the extent to which American society wished to provide ‘enlightened’ care for its mentally ill population. Nearly every state had at least one asylum, and by 1948, there were 539 000 patients in these institutions (13).
Continued at M/C Reviews.
