ABSTRACT
The great age of lunatic asylums-the nineteenth century-coincided with the development and rapid growth of photography. Today we have a photographic residue from the working asylums, including publicity photographs and postcards that show external panoramic views of their architectural splendor and interior photographs of clean wards and uniformed warders and starched nurses. Yet another interior archive exists from working asylums which was never meant for public display: the photographs of patients, and sometimes their bodily parts, taken to enhance medical knowledge of mental pathology. These archives, currently taking new life in books and online, serve to remember the history of psychiatry in different ways and it is an archive which, unbound from its original context, creates new meanings.
