Powerful Asylum Photos Sub #4

The term “mental illness” conjures up images of degradation, impoverishment, unhappiness, frenzy and chaos. In this beautiful collection of gripping photos, Christopher Payne catalogs the decay of state mental hospitals across the country. 
Asylum

Few Americans realize these institutions were once monuments of civic pride, built with noble intentions by leading architects and physicians, who envisioned the asylums as places of refuge, therapy, and healing. -Payne

 Photographer Christopher Payne spent six years documenting the decay of state mental hospitals like these, visiting countless institutions across America. Through his lens we see grand, impressive exteriors and crumbling interiors—chairs stacked against walls with peeling green paint in a grand hallway; brightly colored toothbrushes still hanging on a rack; stacks of suitcases, never packed for the trip home.

For more than half of the nation's history vast mental institutions were prominent features of America's landscape. Now all but gone, 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. Christopher Payne has captured the soul of the asylums themselves through his extraordinary photographs.