naturepunk:lickystickypickyshe:In a warehouse at the Oregon State Hospital (originally called th
naturepunk: lickystickypickyshe: In a warehouse at the Oregon State Hospital (originally called the Oregon State Insane Asylum) contains an unusual library, one comprised not of books, but of copper canisters of unclaimed human remains. Photographer David Maisel has photographed what is left of the deteriorating portions of the asylum, as well as the people whose cremated bodies were left behind. Maisel’s Library of Dust series focuses on this human component of the decaying hospital. Approximately 3,500 canisters still sit on shelves on the hospital grounds (The hospital is still open, although portions of it have been abandoned and have deteriorated), holding the remains of patients who died from 1883 through the 1970s. The oxidation of the canisters has created something unexpectedly colorful in this otherwise grim scene. To Maisel, they speak to the transformative quality of death, asking us to meditate on the matter within the containers. At Maisel’s site, you can see more photographs of the canisters, as well as the Library of Dust itself and a few other parts of the asylum. For those who do not know: The Oregon State Hospital is where the movie adaptation of Ken Kesey’s famous novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, was primarily filmed. I went to the Oregon State Hospital during demolition of the J Building in 2009, and encountered what may be one of the strangest things I have encountered to date: Upon exiting my vehicle and preparing to swap lenses on my camera, two women in white nurse’s uniforms walked out of one of the nearby buildings and passed within a couple yards of my mother and I. The nurses glared at us both, and I recall feeling somewhat violated by their disapproving looks. They seemed to be sending us the message that we didn’t belong there before briskly marching across the parking lot and turning a corner, where they were lost from view. It was then that my mom cleared her throat to get my attention. “You don’t think that was weird at all?” she asked, nearly demanding. She was clearly freaked out. I started to shrug it off - it was a hospital after all - but suddenly stopped cold. Why in the world would two nurses, in uniform, be walking around the hospital during demolition? No one had worked at that portion of the grounds for more than a decade, and it had remained abandoned since. The creepy factor went up another 110% when I snooped around to get a better view of the building the nurses had walked out of, and found that ¾ths of it were completely demolished. -- source link