Asylum

Astoundingly beautiful work on a subject that rarely gets the attention. -- Aaron Britt, Dwell Asylum is a haunting, beautiful book of lost dreams and lost minds. It is a reminder that society's ideals deteriorate more rapidly than the structures built to facilitate them. Asylums for the insane, which started with high intentions, usually ended in horror and neglect. Oliver Sacks has written a deeply moving elegy for the lives of those who lived, and often died at these asylums and Christopher Payne has captured the soul of the asylums themselves through his extraordinary photographs. I cannot imagine forgetting this book: it has evoked sadness, awe, and shame. --Kay Redfield Jamison, Professor of Psychiatry, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and author of An Unquiet Mind Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals contains sadly beautiful photographs by Christopher Payne and a masterful essay by Oliver Sacks that reminds us that state hospitals were not always places of neglect and abuse but also of true asylum--of refuge from the stresses of life. The book presents us with a world of abandoned buildings, forgotten ashes, and derailed futures. It packs a powerful punch. --Elyn R. Saks, author of The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness, and Professor, USC Law School Christopher Payne's Asylum photographs are sensitively rendered, beautifully wrought documents, expressing the dark histories of abandoned asylums across the United States. The cumulative force of these images describe in exacting detail the vanished worlds of these hospital settings, and hint at the lives lived within them. They are haunting and indelible images. --David Maisel, author and photographer, Library of Dust