"It's funny how one can explore something that was once open and lived through without a second thought yet years later, its whole meaning has changed and has tasted time in a whole different way." ~Armando Torres
Most of you know that along with being an avid photographer, I am also a consummate bookworm. Recently while perusing Amazon's recommendations for me, "Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals" came up and I bought it immediately. I then took the time to check out Chris Payne's photography at www.chrispaynephoto.com where I was not disappointed. His work is amazing and his documentation of the demise of the state hospital is unparalleled. With a foreword by renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks (of "Awakenings" fame), this book is a must have in any library.
I was 6 years old when my father first handed me a Pentax A1000 35mm SLR. We were on a beach in Cape Cod and he was teaching me how to focus on a ship in the distance, bobbing on the horizon of the Atlantic.
Twenty two years later I still have, and shoot with, that Pentax. I’ve since upgraded and added a Sony a100 DSLR to my collection as well as adopting a Mamiya RB67 medium format portrait camera but my love of photography hasn’t changed much since the first time I saw, on paper, what I had seen through my lens.
The bulk of my work the last few years has focused on abandoned structures, specifically mental institutions and state schools.
"People are like the abandoned buildings you explore, just in an ever changing way. There are moments and spaces in our lives that feel just like the photos you take, and then those same spaces get filled with just one elegant find and you forget about the morbid beauty of the building and find something else."