Exhibition: Inside the Closed World of Mental Hospitals

Until the 20th of January 2013 there is an interesting exhibition in Het Dolhuys in Haarlem. The title is ‘Architecture of an ideal: Fotography of Christopher Payne & Jannes Linders’.

Pictures of abondoned mental hospitals in the US are exhibited next to pictures of empty psychiatric hospitals in the Netherlands.

The US pictures are by architect/ photographer Christopher Payne (1968) – and are part of his project ‘Asylum: Inside The Closed World of state Mental Hospitals’. Het Dolhuys is a museum of psychiatry, and has asked Dutch architectural photographer Jannes Linders (1955) to make a similar photo reportage of Dutch mental hospitals.

In both the US, and the Netherlands, the mental hospitals become more ‘socialised’ in the 60’s and 70’s. In stead of isolating mentally ill patients, the main conviction in psychiatric healthcare was to become more open and to bring the patients closer to society. Many of the old fashioned style mental institutions closed down abruptly. On the pictures you can see the massiveness and anonimity of the institutions. The goal of the exhibition is to show the change around of the psychiatric institution in the Netherlands from a social and architectonical point of view.