In a previous installment I introduced you, Dear Reader, to David Maisel’s magnificent work of photo-journalism, Library of Dust, published in 2008 by Chronicle Books. The work is overlarge in size and founded upon a project he undertook to assemble 100 C-print photographs that measured 64” x 48” tall and wide, respectively and to give answer to the question: “Who dies?” Each of the several hundred photographs is of a copper canister that once contained the “cremains” of at least 5,121 unclaimed bodies of the inmates of the Oregon State Hospital. Five thousand, one hundred and twenty-one inmates lived and died but were not buried there.
The January 1889 issue of The West Shore, a newsy periodical survey of things Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Alaska and British Columbia, features the nearly new “state asylum” in Salem, Oregon, situated then on “a tract of two hundred and ninety acres,” with a frontage of nearly 500 feet, comprising several buildings that were two, three and four stories in height and that then housed 586 “patients.” The writer claims that the institution “compares favorably with any in the United States” (p. 3). Perhaps that was a bar quite low in height.
I don’t know about you, but I grew up in Salem, Oregon. I sorta knew that One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was not just filmed in but was also based on true accounts of life in the State Hospital located there. Filming began in January of 1975. I graduated from Salem’s Sprague High School in 1976. The mother of my eventual first girlfriend worked the night-shift there at the Oregon State Hospital for years and years and years.
Bay Area-based David Maisel and three colleagues--Geoff Manaugh, Terry Toedtemeier and Michael S. Roth—revealed and analyzed what were for decades a normal, normative practice as regards a large number of the inmates (patients? residents?) in this institution (an insane asylum? a home? a looney bin? a nut-house? a mental institution?). Maisel’s essay is the final of the four, and he notes that the normative practice of cremating unclaimed bodies began in 1913, the institution having been founded in 1883. Gas-cremation continued well into the 1970s.
Certain books make one wonder what else is happening right under one’s nose or radar—what else is one knowingly or unknowingly enabling and perpetuating? Maisel writes that while taking the photographs themselves—through low window-light and soft filters and with exposures lasting up to eight minutes!—he began to think of the library of dust (as one inmate helpfully dubbed it to his face) as an architectural symbol, “like the paradigm of the haunted house in nineteenth-century literature,” a site of “preternatural disturbances,” a house like Edgar Allan Poe’s House of Usher that in normal operation turns the living into a crypt (n.p.).
The Oregon State Hospital operated a gas crematorium there for decades and decades.
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