Unclaimed cremation urns, from Oregon State Hospital. From Asylums: “Fascinated by this phenomenon and its ghosts, photographer Christopher Payne set out to document the afterlife of those baleful buildings in Asylum: Inside The Closed World Of State Mental Hospitals — a compendium of images that peel away at a lost world and, in the process, offer a provocative portrait of the history of our (mis)treatment of the mentally ill.” Intriguingly the site I found this on calls them nineteenth-century asylums, but they’re very clearly not; the shot of a group of toothbrushes shows objects from the twentieth century, and the straightjacket shown looks like a twentieth-century version to me. I do think we try to ascribe asylums to the nineteenth century, since that allows us to place the oppressive and disabling practices of the asylum firmly in the past. This is not a “lost world,” or at least not as much as we would like it to be.
