Asylum

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

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

The book will appeal to historians or scholars of material culture as well as to the medical personnel, photography lovers, and citizens familiar with the lore and lure of asylums.

Jane Simonsen

The Annals of Iowa

Astoundingly beautiful work on a subject that rarely gets the attention.

Aaron Britt

Dwell

Beautifully researched, exquisitely photographed and expertly composed and edited...Extraordinary.

Frieze

Christopher Payne's photographs perfectly match his subjects: they are strong, yet understated and dignified—a fitting tribute to the talented architects who built these asylums and the troubled people they sheltered. It's impossible to look at this wonderful book without imagining the people who lived in these formidable structures, and wondering about their lives and what happened to them.

Henry Horenstein, photographer

...Asylum is of enormous value, as a record of how such places looked in their final years. More than that, and despite its dismal subject matter, it makes for a remarkable and endlessly fascinating book, one that can be recommended with enthusiasm to both the architectural historian and the general reader.

Times Literary Supplement