The 6th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art was concerned with “reality” as a problematic term and a problematic state in the context of post-September 11. Examining the distrust of official evidence, witnessing as representation, and international institutions, Kathrin Rhomberg, the exhibition curator, cites “fictitious weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for war in Iraq” and the recent “international financial crisis” as examples of “the unreality of that which had introduced itself as reality.”1 For Rhomberg, if art and its curatorial display are to engage with discrepancies between explanatory models of the world, as well as incessant media spectacle and individual experiences, how can artistic perspectives on reality refer viewers “back to that world, to what is waiting out there”?2

This commitment to “our own present,” rather than recent western artworld movements “toward new forms of historicism and aesthetic formal issues of the past,” has two main criteria: the works on view should “give artistry only as much space as necessary to make reality visible” and the exhibition itself is designed to place “obstacles in the way of both routine art reception and our run-of-the-mill perception of everyday life—obstacles in the form of blank spots, detours, and great distances between the individual exhibition spaces.”3

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“History breaks down into images, not into stories.”
—Walter Benjamin, Passagenwerk

The City of New York has a new public space. The High Line is an eight-block stretch of defunct elevated train track remade into a public park that opened in June 2009. This renewed, reclaimed ruin embodies several key moments in modernity: the steam engine, the public promenade, the flâneur, the arcade, and the cinema—as articulated by Walter Benjamin. Effectively, the High Line functions as a monument to the ruins of modernity. However, as a contemporary site designed by savvy architects, the High Line is neither a simple representation of modern forms nor a replay of a nineteenth-century monument—one that claims permanence while articulating a triumph inevitably passed. Presenting a scripted urban imaginary, the High Line suspends visitors in a state of collapsed time and space organized into cinematic images—one that invites them to reflect on the collective experience of the metropolis.

The High Line runs along Manhattan’s West Side near the Hudson River, currently reaching from Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking District to 34th Street in Chelsea. Designed by James Corner Field Operations with Diller, Scofidio & Renfro, the track has been transformed into an elevated urban park, a sculpted path that meanders slightly through buildings along 10th Avenue. The High Line was built in the 1930s to enable efficient delivery of goods to and from industrial businesses and to prevent accidents with street-level traffic. Mail, milk, poultry, and automobiles could be loaded and unloaded directly into buildings that opened onto the track. This freight-only line was known as “The Life Line of New York.” Out of use by 1980, it was abandoned until 1999, when The Friends of the High Line began campaigning to develop the elevated land into a public park.

Today, walking up the stairs to the three-story-high space, the visitor enters a magical zone. Immediately lifted from the drudgery, dinge, and chaos of the city streets, one ascends to wild landscaping, fresh views, wooden benches, strolling citizens, and buildings parting to make a path. The Standard Hotel towers over the southern stretch—a magnificent relic of International Style architecture. Slits in the irregular concrete ground transition into selectively preserved stretches of train track that serve as plant beds. It is a disorienting, yet strangely harmonious blend of industrial decay and ever developing city, of nostalgia and innovation.

The landscaping is especially uncanny as grasses, flowers, and small trees fill gaps in what remains of the tracks. “Keep it wild, keep on the path” signs instruct passersby, as if the landscaping were indigenous, happenstance. The grasses and flowers look suspiciously like weeds, but perfectly arranged and tended to. This celebration of a once seamy and neglected space artfully finesses the effect of dereliction, giving way to a safely sanitized experiential pleasure. The ruin is renovated.

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“Real art is play, & play is one of the most immediate of all experiences.”—Hakim Bey

In recognition of the cross-cultural influence of electronic gaming, artists are tapping into the global reach of the medium to advance interrogations of present conditions. A number of recent artistic projects themed on armed conflict and war have combined formats ranging from video games to online performance to installation art. The works discussed here are by Rolando Sánchez from Peru,1 France-based American artist Douglas Edric Stanley,2 and Iraqi-born, New York City-based artist Wafaa Bilal.3 These pieces are best understood as repurposings of popular digital games and game formats for cultural critique at the intersections of representation, play, and power. By recoding the play experience, these artists attempt to goad audiences in performative situations designed to amplify and expose cultural assumptions and ideological undercurrents.

Sánchez, a trained painter and engineer, and Stanley, a digital artist, conceived their works as critiques addressing the historization of catastrophic events from the recent past through deconstructions of official histories. Modifications of the familiar game interfaces comment on the contradictions between war as a media event and war as a real experience. Sánchez’s Matari 69200 (2004–05) consists of an Atari 2600 video game system connected to a television and five reprogrammed game cartridges. The work conflates the artist’s experiences both as an Atari gamer and as a tele-spectator of the guerrilla war that pitted Peruvian military forces against the Shining Path Maoist guerrillas active throughout the 1980s. As he states: “While parts of Peru suffered the inclemencies of war, for others war was only an experience they partook in through watching TV; their position in relation to the war was similar to one of a child playing video games.”4 The title of the work, Matari, is a combination of the word Atari (in reference to a disabling move in the Japanese game GO)5 and the Spanish verb “to kill,” matar. The number 69200 represents the official estimate of terrorism casualties in Peru during the twenty years of political and social unrest.

Sánchez began work on the piece shortly after the final presentation of a report by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, an independent organization investigating the circumstances of the Peruvian state’s war on terror. Public presentation of the commission’s final conclusions included televised testimonies by civilians caught in the conflict, and a permanent photographic record of the conflict currently housed in the Museum of the Nation in Lima, and open to the public.6 The piece responds to the conclusions reached by the commission linking the “massive murder, disappearance and torture” to “indolence, incompetence and indifference” on the part of authorities. To this end, Sánchez revisits four iconic televised war events, each titled in reference to the event portrayed, while the fifth is the artist’s commentary on the representation of the conflict.

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Stanley Greenberg has published two books of large-format, black-and-white photographs exploring the infrastructure of New York City, Invisible New York: The Hidden Infrastructure of the City (1998) and Waterworks: A Photographic Journey through New York’s Hidden Water System (2003). The first focuses on the city’s guts, primarily its bridges and tunnels, including the subway system; the second on its veins, which bring unfiltered water from the Catskill Mountains and Westchester County to the city’s taps. Greenberg has made a habit of finding places essential to the daily lives of New Yorkers that most will never see and revealing these industrial sites in luxurious detail, using a photographic practice that seems to come from the same era as the engineering feats he records. If his past books feel as if they had their eyes on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the grand plans they commemorate were conceived and implemented, Greenberg’s new book and his next both feature twenty-first century technologies.

Architecture Under Construction was published by the University of Chicago Press in spring 2010, with a brief essay by Joseph Rosa, formerly Chief Curator of Architecture at the Art Institute of Chicago, where a companion exhibition of Greenberg’s photographs was on display this summer. The book takes a close look at the skeletons of the gravity-defying organic forms pioneered by Frank Gehry and other architects who employ computer technology to create curving skins of structural steel. This new design strategy was heavily used when the real estate market was at its peak, creating similarly inflated forms, dubbed “blob” architecture in its early days. Greenberg gradually enlarged his survey, conducted between 2001 and 2007, to include a full range of ambitious contemporary buildings. Next year, his Time Machines: Accelerating Back to the Big Bang will be published, with a companion show at New York’s Gitterman Gallery in the spring. This forthcoming title, photographed between 2006 and 2009, explores the tools used to conduct high-energy physics experiments, such as particle accelerators and bubble chambers—machines that detect subatomic particles traveling from outer space or create them deep underground by smashing particle beams together. Greenberg has turned his camera in new directions, but he is still looking into the structure of the universe, staring at contraptions most people will never see. This interview was conducted via email in May 2010.

Stephen Longmire: These two new books take you out of New York City, which inspired much of your previous work. How did each of these projects come about, and how do you feel about the shift in focus?

Stanley Greenberg: After I finished Waterworks, I wasn’t sure what the next project was, except that I thought it was time to do a smaller project that didn’t need to be a book. I was in a group exhibition [at New York’s Municipal Art Society in 2001] about Fresh Kills, the huge landfill on Staten Island that was about to be closed, and met the architect Steven Holl at the opening. He asked me if I’d be interested in photographing one of his buildings [Simmons Hall], still under construction at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [MIT]. I went up there and, after a day of shooting, realized construction sites of contemporary architecture could be a great project. There were so many new designs that had been impossible to build before, which, because of new technologies, were going up everywhere. Extremely complex, non-Cartesian shapes can be built off site, and then assembled in place. I’ve always been interested in architecture and fascinated with construction, so it made perfect sense. Gaining access to the buildings I wanted to photograph was time consuming but relatively easy compared to New York’s infrastructure. The hard part was waiting for the buildings to get underway, and, at least at the beginning, trying to figure out when to visit. I received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005, so I was able to visit building sites all around North America.

I’m not sure exactly how the physics project got started. I’ve always been interested in science—I went to a science high school, Stuyvesant in Manhattan, about an hour from where I grew up in Brooklyn—and had been following the progress of the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and highest energy particle accelerator, at CERN [the European Organization for Nuclear Research, located on the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva]. I spoke with someone at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation about the project and he suggested that I visit a few sites, find a physicist to guide me, and then submit a proposal. I found a professor at Columbia University, Janet Conrad [now at MIT], to help me. She invited me to view her experiment at Fermilab [the second largest particle accelerator, just west of Chicago] and connected me with physicists all around the world. Eventually, I received a book grant from the Sloan Foundation to travel internationally to photograph high-energy physics experiments.

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[Ed. note: This is the first part of a two-part essay.]

Since the early 1990s, the progressive authentication of augmented reality (AR) over virtual reality (VR) in a variety of domains—medicine, military training, robotics, education, communications, entertainment, tourism, design, and art, to name the most obvious—increased awareness of the accuracy of Gilles Deleuze’s insight formulated in L’image-temps (1985), according to which the temporal categories of the virtual and the actual had come to exchange and displace one another in a relationship of “indiscernibility.”1 Although this relationship characterized the making of the “crystal image” in contemporary cinema (where the coalescence of temporal layers replaces the succession of shots typical of pre-war narrative cinema), it prefigures the quasi-indiscernibility in augmented reality’s spatialization of cinema. The engineers Paul Milgram and Fumio Kishino introduced the spatial equivalent of the virtual-actual tie in their formulation of the “real-virtual continuum” to describe the unbroken scale ranging from real to virtual environments, with augmented reality and augmented virtuality located “anywhere between” the two ends of the spectrum2:

As Milgram’s schema specifies, the real-virtual continuum—the unbroken scale ranging from real to virtual environments—is the foundational assumption of digital forms of augmented reality (AR).3 AR builds up a continuity between the real and the virtual, in which the two categories tend to lose, although never completely, their distinction in relation to one another as they interact with each other. It is this concept of the real-virtual continuum that underlies Ronald Azuma, et al.’s definition of AR that will be used here: AR as a system that “supplements the realworld with virtual (computer-generated) objects that appear to coexist in the same space as the realworld.”4 This supplementing occurs through the addition of dynamic, interactive, and context-specific information to the user’s sensory perception of space. This perceptual dimension is pivotal, as it is not the space itself but the perception and experience of the space that is hypothesized to be augmented. In medical applications, for example, a surgeon can wear a head-mounted display (HMD) device equipped with a semi-transparent visor that overlays his or her perception of the patient’s body with the preparatory study of the internal anatomy projected on the screen.5 In automobile applications, AR visualizing systems enable the projection of global positioning system (GPS) cartographic information on the car’s windshield or front screen, allowing the driver to see the outside environment through a constantly updated map of the area. Augmented reality is a perceptual paradigm. To be more precise, it is a perceptual predicament. Considering that the definitive (yet still unachieved) goal is “to create a system such that the user [cannot] tell the difference between the real world and the virtual augmentation of it,”6 the perceptual motivation underlying AR research carries several technical challenges—notably, the imperative to perfect the panoply of technologies that converge to assemble a mixed real-virtual continuum for the observer-participant. From audiovisual (head mounted, wall mounted, handheld) display and playback devices, to human-machine interface systems, to body-tracking and sensing and surveillance instruments, one of the most difficult technical challenges is the requirement for the computer to track where the user is looking and determine what s/he is seeing in order to augment his/her view.7 This has been from the start the impetus of AR explorations.

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Linn Underhill is an esteemed art professor at Colgate University, and her first retrospective, “Of Someone and Something: Photographs 1991–2010,” comprised of seven photographic series and several artist’s books, was truly well deserved: her work is intelligent, technically precise, and filled with both pathos and humor. Given Underhill’s position at the college, the particularly large scale of some of her photographs, and the overall number of images, Underhill’s work should have been the only show in the gallery. As it was, sharing space with documentary photographs of Karachi, Pakistan, the retrospective felt cramped. Additionally, the lack of information regarding photographic process, print type, and dimensions was frustrating, even for a non-formalist. But the artworks’ strong thematic concerns, as well as Underhill’s succinct didactics (which drew attention to her aims without limiting interpretation), more than made up for those weaknesses.

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In 2006, Erno Nussenzweig took legal action against the photographer Philip-Lorca diCorcia, offended that the photographer had taken and exhibited his photograph without permission. Nussenzweig argued his privacy had been invaded and personal rights violated, but the court sided with diCorcia, ruling that the photographer’s act constituted art. This was a landmark precedent in which the right to artistic expression was supported over another individual’s right to control their own image.

It is fitting that shots from diCorcia’s series “Heads” (2001)—which included Nussenzweig’s “stolen” portrait—open Tate Modern’s latest blockbuster photography show, “Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera.” Placed opposite Walker Evans’s surreptitious Subway Passengers from 1938, diCorcia’s flash-lit street portraits stage a dialogue across the twentieth-century, presenting the exhibition’s central figure of the “unseen photographer” as an ongoing historical phenomenon, an agent of voyeuristic looking as old as the medium itself.

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It has been nearly three years since Richard Billingham’s last London show. His recent photography exhibition at Anthony Reynolds Gallery is simply titled “Richard Billingham.” His name is still well known in the art world, following his renowned series and photobook Ray’s a Laugh (1996), which resulted in an invitation to take part in the legendary “Sensation” exhibition of 1997 at the Royal Academy in London and won him the Citigroup Photography Prize in 1997 as well as Tate Britain’s prestigious Turner Prize nomination in 2001. Since then, Billingham has had a major retrospective exhibition at the Australian Center for Contemporary Art in Melbourne in 2007–08, and his work has been acquired by many major collections.

Rather than referring to Billingham’s years of Young British Artists fame, the title of the show seems to suggest something more essential for the understanding of the artist’s oeuvre. The exhibition presents a variety of subject matters consisting of pastoral landscapes, middle-class home interiors, and curious family and animal portraits. The exhibition includes both color and black-and-white photography of various sizes; some taken using a tripod, others with a snapshot technique allowing more spontaneity and an intentional lessening of artist control. Moreover, Billingham works on anything from panoramic and medium-format cameras to cheap disposables, photographing on both high and low resolutions. The gallery’s curatorial decision to show such a range of topics and methods invites the spectator to reconsider Billingham’s work—“to avoid thinking in categories,” as Billingham puts it.1 Some of the earlier interpretations of Billingham’s work have focused on the disfunctionality of the artist’s family, portrayed in the series “Ray’s a Laugh.” This exhibition, however, presented a variety of subject matters that drew attention to Billingham’s interest in photographic space.

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John Baldessari is a demigod in Los Angeles—a revered educator, patron, thinker, and artist. Countless individuals have been influenced by his teachings, as well as his works, to such an extent that almost nothing that juxtaposes found image and text is devoid of reference to his creations. In 1990, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (LACMA) launched a Baldessari exhibition that introduced the artist to those unacquainted with his works, and now twenty years later, LACMA is revisiting that territory with “Pure Beauty.” Whether it is pure coincidence or not, these exhibitions have over thirty-five works in common (out of 150 in the current LACMA exhibition). Because Baldessari is an incredibly prolific artist, the overlaps are unfortunate and the show might have been stronger had it concentrated on work made since 1991. Baldessari works in myriad media, making paintings, prints, photographs, installations, and now even an iPhone app. The finished pieces are usually derived from isolating or rearranging—taking things apart and putting them back together anew. Best known for his appropriationist strategies, Baldessari uses movie stills as the basis of insightful and witty juxtapositions that occasionally offer poignant social commentary.

In a retrospective, the underlying premise is to introduce a vast body of work in a condensed fashion to a general audience. For that reason, many museum shows are generalized presentations of an artist’s work—one from this series, one from that series—to round out the artist’s oeuvre. Baldessari exhibitions are frequent, therefore, this museum exhibition becomes a walk down memory lane. What makes the LACMA exhibition different from previous Baldessari shows is its ability to trace a new trajectory—the influence and use of technology on his work. Because the exhibition spans more than forty years, one can now look back in time and clearly see Baldessari’s inventive uses of technology.

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The term “haunted” conjures up visions of ghosts, poltergeists, tortured souls, and demons. A more complex meaning of the word is to be preoccupied with memory or an idea to the point of obsession; to be haunted is to be distressed or disturbed.1 The Guggenheim’s press release for the exhibition “Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance” states, “Much of contemporary photography and video seems haunted by the past, by the history of art, by apparitions that are reanimated with reproductive mediums, live performance and the virtual world.”2 In addition to the expansive theme, the curators faced the daunting challenge of extracting works from the Guggenheim’s permanent collection that cohesively and provocatively examine the topic. Featuring one hundred works by sixty artists, “Haunted” presents a multi-faceted view into how contemporary artists use photographic images and processes.

The curators Jennifer Blessing and Nat Trotman classified the exhibition into four sections that address formal and conceptual connections among the works. The first section, “Appropriation and the Archive,” examines the postmodern shift of artists using sourced photography and images from popular culture. Featured are seminal works from Sarah Charlesworth, Douglas Gordon, Barbara Kruger, Sherry Levine, Richard Prince, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol, among others. While the works bear some relevance, most of them have been previously exhibited many times in more interesting contexts. Considering the works in relationship to the exhibition theme, the idea that photography is haunted by the past seems an obvious interpretation. Some of these works, however, do transcend this basic connection: Warhol’s image of electric chairs (Orange Disaster #5, 1963) continues to resonate due to its bleak reminder of our failed justice system. Charlesworth’s series “Modern History” (1977–79) questions how photographs shape history, using stark images that remind us of our fleeting collective memory.

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While wandering through a little maze at the Worchester Art Museum, something that looks like a large-scale rendition of a human femur appears through a glass door down a hall. A closer look reveals Actions Speak, a 67 x 17-foot, context-specific interior mural and exterior projection by the artist collaborative THINK AGAIN (David John Attyah and S.A. Bachman). The piece is part of the “Wall at WAM” series, organized by Susan Stoops, the museum’s Curator of Contemporary Art. Central to the museum’s contemporary curatorial mandate, the Wall is, according to museum literature, “a laboratory for participating artists and visitors alike.”1 A laboratory in which “monumental scale, ephemeral nature, and moving juxtaposition of past and present” come together to delight, solicit, and challenge an audience initially drawn, presumably, to the museum’s substantial and well-established historical collection.

The left side of the mural depicts a somber mass of dry bones, hand-drawn, enlarged, and collaged into a pile. The paper bones are intertwined with masses of black microphone cable and float on a field of black ash. The right side of the picture is dominated by two enormous microphones on a bed of salt. Each microphone is rendered useless—one is covered in a red condom—a limp, translucent, glistening sheath—and the other is covered in the chopped heads of countless smashed and smeared lipsticks. Each element of the image exists in perspectival tension with the others, leaving the viewer to choose between the logic of the bed of coals or that of the paper bones that hover in front of it. The same happens with the bed of salt: the lines of text cascade down the far right of the image, recalling some bizarre tele-prompter. The words solicit:

Raid. Violate. Shame. Scar. Occupy. Embed. Obliterate. Explode. Smear. Gloss. Whitewash. Exile. Scapegoat. Pander. Sugarcoat. Humiliate. Bruise. Discredit. Misquote. Deny. Debase . . . New words constantly emerge. Quarantine. Deport. Harangue. Cluster-bomb. Sanitize. Censor. And in red—Silence. Stigmatize. Brutalize: Actions Speak.

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“Dennis Hopper: Double Standard,” at The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles, is a loving tribute to the influential celebrity/artist/filmmaker/actor who died from prostate cancer on May 29, 2010. Curated by his friend Julian Schnabel, the exhibition was organized in six months, in the hope that Hopper would survive to see the opening—which he did not.

Hopper was an enigmatic figure, who reinvented himself into various personas over his prolific and fascinating life. He was a dilettante in the most generous sense of the word—one who loved art and artists and threw himself into the creative process, yet his artistic output is mostly mediocre. Some of his early photographs are wonderful, although his paintings and sculptures are merely derivative of the styles and movements he loved.

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Throughout his career, Yves Klein emphasized traditionally extrinsic elements of the work of art, leveling the conventional hierarchy between work and supporting document. The Hirshhorn Museum and Walker Art Center’s jointly organized exhibition, “Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers,” the first major North American retrospective of Klein’s work in almost thirty years, flirts with this emphasis. The exhibition begins and ends with reproductions of Obsession with Levitation (Leap into the Void), the famous 1960 photograph of Klein in mid-air, his torso craned upward and arms outstretched, having apparently just hurled his body from the second story of a building and appearing seconds away from belly-flopping onto the street beneath him. The image was originally circulated as the cover photo of a fake newspaper promoting Klein’s work, which he printed in an edition of several thousand and distributed to newsstands around Paris. It ran accompanied by the caption “A man in space! The painter of space hurls himself into the void!”

For all intents and purposes a publicity photograph, Leap was Klein’s testament to his devotion to “the Void,” a spiritual essence (liberally adapted from the writings of Gaston Bachelard) in the name of which Klein waged his artistic career. His display of devotion was put on, however: he had his photographers edit out the stagehands holding a tarpaulin to catch his fall. Like many of Klein’s works, Leap comes with a caveat and yet, unlike Marcel Duchamp, the artist’s tongue is not planted firmly in cheek. The curators have exhibited the works with only Klein’s own supporting documents for context, a strategy that presents Klein’s self-mythologization without the necessary distance or perspective to help draw out the contradiction between neo-Romantic mysticism and the canny fabrication that he carefully encoded into his career. Depending on the viewer’s inclination, Klein is alternately a heroic devotee to mystical aesthetic experience, a hopelessly delusional Romantic, or a cynical fraud. A now-popular fourth reading, Klein as critical manipulator and unmasker of spectacular culture, is foreclosed by the exhibition’s dutiful fidelity to the artist’s stated, but possibly ironic, intentions.1

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In the 1980s, binge buying and credit cards became a way of life. Street styling and fashion labels were everything. Video games, aerobics, minivans, camcorders, and talk shows were the norm. From Aretha Franklin, Parliament, and The Clash to Michael Jackson and Guns N’ Roses, musicians wrote hit songs that remained on Billboard’s Top Ten music charts for more than just a few months. The decade encapsulated double-digit inflation, President Ronald Reagan was the catalyst for highly charged debates on the war on drugs and the elimination of nuclear weapons, unemployment increased, hospital costs rose steeply, and many were lost to AIDS. On the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in a storefront at 244 East 13th Street, the aim of the members of Group Material (GM) was to tackle these issues. Their goals were thus not necessarily the same as their counterparts in the commercial art scene.
Show and Tell: A Chronicle of Group Material (2010) is the first monograph of GM, the New York-based artists’ collective (1979–96). The authors concentrate mostly on the written and visual evidence of approximately forty-five projects produced by GM that engaged the social, political, and art historical issues of the 1980s and ‘90s. For example, in “Your Message Here” (1990), individuals and members of groups were invited to design site-specific billboards located throughout the city of Chicago. As a mode of addressing the public, contributors identified a wide ethnic, social, and economic spectrum. Mary Patten’s billboard affirms these concerns through a revealing display that encompasses keywords, full-length portraits, and the footer “talk about it.”

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Like many children, I sometimes visited my parents at work. I eagerly anticipated these special excursions. Unlike those of most children, however, these visits occurred at a state mental institution where my stepfather worked for twenty-five years as a clinical psychologist. I recall my first visit as a young teen: I do not remember feeling scared, just curious to meet the patients I had heard so much about. My stepfather made formal introductions as if it were a ceremonious occasion. I met Bob, who thought he was a rabbit. He hopped with his hands up by his face, twitching his nose and eating carrots. Jane was catatonic, wearing a shapeless housedress and rocking back and forth for hours. Another man spoke convincingly about a government conspiracy and aliens. The patients were just as curious about me as I was about them. My stepfather never spoke to them as if they were ill. He listened to their stories and asked questions. He related to each person on his or her own level, no matter how strange it may have seemed to observers. That experience left an indelible mark on me—the fine line between sanity and insanity. In college, years later, I wanted to revisit the asylum to photograph the buildings and grounds, to document their steady descent into decay and ruin. Prohibited by legal bureaucracy, the project was never realized. So it was with great anticipation that I awaited the publication of Christopher Payne’s book, Asylum (2009).

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