Library of Dust is a haunting photographic odyssey by David Maisel. The work depicts individual copper canisters, each containing the cremated remains of patients from the Oregon State Hospital. The patients died at the hospital between 1883 (the year the facility opened, when it was called the Oregon State Insane Asylum) and the 1970’s. All have remained unclaimed by their families.
How did the title come about?
During Maisel’s first visit to the hospital a “young male prisoner in a blue jumpsuit, with his feet planted firmly outside the doorway, leans his upper body into the room, scans the cremated remains, and whispers in a low tone, “The library of dust.”
Maisel goes on:
The prisoner’s use of the term “library” is apt. The room housing these canisters is an attempt for order, categorization, and rationality to be imposed upon randomness, chaos, and the irrational. Imagine the many separate fates that led these thousands of individuals to this room. What combination of choice and chance, of illness, of representation and misrepresentation, an infinite number of slippages multiplied more than three thousand times over, circumscribes this room, this library?.
The Library of Dust has just been published in book form by Chronicle Books. It features 80 photographs and essays by Geoff Manaugh, Terry Toedtemeier and Michael Roth.
An exhibit of Maisel’s Library of Dust photos is currently on view at the Haines Gallery in San Francisco.
David Maisel’s website
Thanks to boingboing for the lead