Abandoned cafés, vacant beauty salons and barbershops that haven't provided a quick trim in decades make up a small selection of the images captured by architect and photographer Christopher Payne.
The photos tell a story of self-sustaining lifestyles, isolated living spaces and life in state mental hospitals throughout the country.
Housed in the Kennedy Museum of Art, Payne's exhibit Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals is displayed at The Ridges - a key piece in the collection.
Among peeling walls and deserted corridors, Payne found inspiration in the knowledge of the self-sufficient environment the asylums maintained.
The notion of self sufficiency was a distinguishing characteristic of the asylums and state hospitals
Payne said. It seems quaint in retrospect but at the time the way these facilities operated was a microcosm of the way American society functioned as a whole.
At the asylums, goods were made on site and each patient had a tangible connection to the clothes they wore
the tools they used (and) the food they ate
Payne said.
Though Payne is not advocating a complete return to a self-sufficient lifestyle, his photographs are meant to engage the viewer in what was once a standard way of living.
I do think there's something inherently wonderful
simple and satisfying about making something. So I suppose my photographs are meant to show what we've lost on the way toward material progress and consumer convenience: a sense of pride and craft in one's work and the dignity of manual labor
Payne said.
Payne's collection includes the domestic front of state mental hospitals including a slaughterhouse at Broughton State Hospital in North Carolina and a corncrib at Eastern State Hospital in Kentucky.
Through his photographs
the artist wanted to especially show the architecture side of the mental hospital
Petra Kralickova, curator at Kennedy Museum of Art, said in an e-mail. Also
he hopes to point attention to these buildings as a historical treasure.
Payne began his six-year hunt for state mental hospitals in 2002. He visited 70 institutions in 30 states, documenting each of his trips from behind the lens. With a myriad of hospitals to select from, Payne stuck to personal criteria to narrow his search.
If a space was described as 'looking as if the occupants just picked up and left 30 years ago
' then I knew it was probably worth the trip
