Getting inside state mental hospitals

The construction of state mental hospitals was an experiment that began with lofty ideals but ended badly. “Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals’’ (MIT) is an evocative photographic history of the promise and the peril of these institutions. In the introduction, Oliver Sacks, who worked at a state mental hospital in the Bronx for 25 years, calls photographer Christopher Payne “a visual poet.’’ That he is. Payne visited 70 hospitals in 30 states, capturing the soaring architecture and the traces of past lives - the rows of toothbrushes still hanging and the suitcases never packed for a trip home.