Picturing Disability

In this chapter, I diverge slightly from my focus on photographic images of people with disabilities. Here I spotlight pictures taken of one type of facility that housed people with disabilities—asylums, large residential settings that dominated some rural landscapes in the later part of the nineteenth century and the first sixty years of the twentieth century. Some of the images I examine include people with disabilities, but many, such as illustration 5.1, do not.

I scrutinize three types of photographs. First are picture postcards of asylums created by businessmen to sell to the public as souvenirs or vehicles for correspondence. Illustration 5.1 is an example. Next I look at public-relations photographs taken by or for institutional administrators for placement in reports, brochures, and newspapers for the purposes of promoting their facilities. Finally, I look at muckraking images taken by people who wanted to make institutional abuse public with the purpose of rousing citizens and officials to action in order to alleviate the terrible conditions. Absent from this review of asylum images are clinical photographs—photos taken in institutions for patient records and to be used as illustrations in textbooks and professional articles. Martin Elks takes up this type of photo in chapter 6.

Looking at these three categories of pictures taken by people with different agendas reveals how photographs of similar locations can vary radically depending on different picture takers’ intentions. In the case of asylums, the picture makers ranged from local and regional postcard photographers who produced images for profit to administrators who sought to promote their own institutions to those outside the system who wanted to expose the abuse of inmates.

On October 11, 1911, Mrs. Herman Miller walked to her roadside rural mail box in Iowa to see what the postman had delivered.¹¹ A picture postcard from her cousins Clara and Frank greeted her. She flipped it over to look at the view. It was of a large ornate building in attractive, landscaped surroundings. The caption read “MAIN BUILDING—NORTHERN ILL. INSANE ASYLUM, ELGIN” (illus. 5.2).

Although the idea of receiving a postcard with a picture of an “insane asylum” seems odd today, Mrs. Miller most likely thought nothing of it. In fact, views of that subject matter were so common at the time that it was not even referred to in the message on the opposite side. It was just another card to add to Mrs. Miller’s growing postcard collection.

By 1911, picture postcards were outrageously popular, and those with asylums on them were a common, taken-for-granted genre of the medium. They sparked my curiosity as well as my collecting zeal. Mrs. Miller’s card is part of my collection of more than sixteen hundred US picture postcards with scenes of institutions for the so-called mentally ill, feebleminded, defective, and epileptic that I put together over fifteen years. I draw on these cultural artifacts in this chapter.

As was the case with the card Mrs. Miller received from Clara and Frank, 56 percent of the pictures show a particular building. In more than half of this group, the building pictured is the one that housed the administration (illus. 5.3). Other structures commonly pictured include the superintendent’s residence, inmate dormitories, employee quarters, the hospital, the laundry, and other buildings where employees and patients worked (illus. 5.4).

The buildings pictured are large, imposing, and architecturally ornate, and they are usually located in well-landscaped surroundings with manicured lawns, trees, and shrubs. The administration building and other buildings pictured were usually the first constructed and had the most ornate facades and massive presence. Although on some cards the scene looks stark, cold, and dreary—like something out of a horror movie (illus. 5.5)—these institutions most often look pleasant, more like a college campus than a prison.

The great majority of the cards featuring asylum structures does not include people. In the 13 percent that do, the people are shown at a distance, as minor accessories to the main subject, the buildings (see how the buildings dwarf the people in illustration 5.4). It is difficult to discern whether the people pictured are staff, inmates, or visitors.

About one-quarter of the cards show the institution from a distance and are referred to as a “bird’s eye view” or some similar phrase in the caption. These shots were taken from atop a hill or from a tall building on the edge of the grounds and provide an expansive view of a significant portion of the institution, the buildings as well as the grounds. The size of some of the campuses is striking. The hand-written comment on the picture side of the card in illustration 5.6 states: “There are fifteen hundred Insane patients in This Hospital.” In another, a bird’s eye view of the Hospital for the Insane in Weston, West Virginia, the institution is spread over the valley floor (illus. 5.7).

Seven percent of the cards feature the grounds. Well-tended lawns, flowers, lakes, and water fountains are on display. These scenes are almost idyllic, with babbling brooks, calm lakes, lush vegetation, and blooming flowers. A few show golf courses. The viewer might have the impression that she or he is looking at a millionaire’s estate or a well-maintained park. Illustration 5.8 is of decorative water fountain on the grounds of the State Insane Asylum in Salem, Oregon, with the statue of a nymph on top and water spraying into the surrounding pool.

Only 3 percent of the cards show the gate or entrance to the campus. A favorite view of this type is of the elaborate iron and masonry entrance, with the name of the institution displayed on the arch entryway (illus. 5.9).

Most activity took place inside the buildings, but only 2 percent of the pictures on postcards are interior shots. They show a sanitary orderly setting and, although sparsely furnished, a pleasant, almost hotel-like living environment. We see hardly a hint of the unhealthy and inhumane conditions so prevalent in these institutions at the time.

The interior-view cards are more likely to include people than the outside-view cards. In illustration 5.10, patients and staff are lining the long corridor on Ward 3 in Gowanda State Mental Hospital in Collins, New York. This interior-view card and others show wards adorned with Christmas, Fourth of July, or other holiday decorations. On such occasions, an institution’s staff spiffed up the facility for visitors.

Illustration 5.11 was taken inside Gowanda at the same time as illustration 5.10. The staff is neatly dressed; some patients are sitting in the background, and others are occupying beds. The ward is exceptionally clean and orderly, as are the patients.

The Gowanda cards are real photo postcards rather than machine-printed ones. Real photo postcards were printed directly from a negative onto photo postcard stock and were produced by local photographers in smaller numbers than printed cards. Photographers who shot real photo postcards were locals, and because of personal ties to the people who worked in these institutions they could gain access to their interior spaces. They of course did not have free entry to all parts of the buildings at any time and operated under constraints. If they did not take images that showed the facilities in a positive way, they suffered the institution officials’ wrath. Staff sanctions were not the only constraint. There were economic incentives for positive views. People who bought postcards wanted to see images that showed off the institution, not exposed its faults.

People at the time the pictures of Gowanda’s interior were produced probably accepted the images as positive, even complimentary to the people who ran the facilities, but through the critical eyes of present-day observers, the scenes in illustrations 5.10 and 5.11 show overcrowding and forced idleness. In the hall scene, the male patients who line the walls are slumped over; one is even lying down on a bench, doing nothing. The Christmas decorations in both gloomy scenes are ironic. Despite the order and cleanliness of the hospital ward image in illustration 5.11, the room is so jam-packed with beds that the image documents excessive overcrowding rather than orderly cheer.

Whether the pictures were taken by local craftspeople or by company agents, there were standard views to shoot and conventions in taking these shots. Any notable landmark on a card had sales potential. It does not appear that asylums were purposely sought out more than any other place. In some rural areas, finding something distinctive to photograph could be a challenge. In towns with mental hospitals or other asylums, these venues provided the most impressive and unique architectural structures and landscapes available. In small towns, asylum postcards contributed to rendering the institution’s main buildings into local icons.

Photographic technique was not sophisticated for asylum cards. In shooting buildings, be they of an asylum or other facility, photographers chose angles that made the buildings attractive by exaggerating their size and emphasizing their architectural splendor. Buildings that were the subject of the picture dominated the card and were often the only object in view.

It was not just on asylum cards that the roads and grounds around buildings were barren of people and activity. This was common in cards of noninstitutional settings as well. The photographer typically took the pictures in the early morning or on Sunday when people were not around. It was easier that way, and it was known that the presence of people or automobiles in a picture dated the card, decreasing its shelf life. Thus, leaving people out of most of the images used for asylum cards was not done out of respect for the inmates or for their protection; it was for commercial reasons.

That the conventions used in photographing asylums were the same as those used to photograph other local buildings and scenes is well illustrated by the difficulty in distinguishing asylums from other major constellations of buildings without reading the captions. This difficulty was made vivid when I looked for cards under the name of a town that included both an asylum and a college. Poughkeepsie, New York, was the home of both the Hudson River State Hospital, a large institution for the mentally ill, and Vassar College, an elite women’s college. In looking at postcard images of buildings in Poughkeepsie, I often mistook the insane asylum for the college.

Both printed and real-photo asylum postcards were produced for commercial purposes to be sold to visitors as well as to townspeople. I found no evidence that any of the cards were fashioned by, for, or under the direction of government employees, institutional staff, or other officials associated with the asylums. Nevertheless, the cards depict the institution in an unrealistically positive light, a view that the administration would favor. Although the photographers did not produce cards to please the administration, they did want to attract potential buyers.

At first, I was incredulous when I discovered asylum postcards. To me, they were morbid—cruel. The senders, receivers, and producers had clearly not shared my disquietude. They looked at asylums and asylum postcards through a very different lens. The sheer number of early-twentieth-century postcards with pictures of institutions for people with mental disorders and the fact that so many messages on the cards did not even refer to the asylum pictured suggest that such cards were taken for granted. For some, they were perhaps even a display of pride. Asylums, like schools, post offices, main streets, and other local sites, were just part of the local landscape, symbols of place.

For one group of stakeholders, administrators and other institution-affiliated officials, including boards of visitors, the visual championing of their facilities was a conscious, strategic part of their public-relations arsenal. The officials of virtually every institution either hired local photographers or employed staff to take pictures to promote their institution’s amenities. Some of the images were released to the press for wide public distribution; others were used in annual reports and pamphlets produced for state bureaucrats and legislators and distributed to other citizens.

Although the use of photographs in institutional propaganda goes back to the nineteenth century, it was not until the early twentieth century that they were widely employed. The surge in their use was a function of advances in printing technology. By the start of the twentieth century, copies of photographs could be easily and inexpensively included in newspapers, magazines, brochures, and other printed materials.⁶⁶ Most annual institution reports, commissioners’ reports, and other official printed materials soon contained illustrations that were originally photos.⁷⁷

In the late 1910s and early 1920s, the director of the Syracuse State Institution for Feeble-Minded Children (in the 1920s its name was changed to “Syracuse State School for Mental Defectives”), like other administrators of the time, engaged a photographer, William Allen, to take pictures of the institution.⁸⁸ In exchange for room and board and a modest stipend, Allen, a Syracuse University student, took not only the mug shot that appeared in each inmate’s official record, but also public-relations pictures of the institutional grounds. Although he was only starting his career as a photographer, he produced images that were well executed, nicely composed, and professional looking. That professional touch was typical of visual institutional propaganda. By virtue of his and other institutional picture takers’ competence in producing pictures that had the aura of authority, these images came to dominate how people thought about these places.

Illustration 5.12 is an example of the Syracuse photographer’s work. It was the lead illustration in the 1922 annual report produced by the Syracuse State School’s Board of Visitors as required by the New York State Legislature. Reminiscent of postcard photography, it shows the asylum’s imposing main building. The caption under the picture proudly hails the structure as “The First Public Building Erected in America to Care for the Feeble-Minded.”

In the second Syracuse asylum photograph included here (illus. 5.13), the institutional residents are diligently engaged in what the caption labels as “Morning Colors,” the morning institutional ritual of raising the large American flag up the imposing pole in front of the main building. Four boys form a straight line to the right of the flag, three of them holding bugles and apparently playing the National Anthem. Another boy is posed next to the pole to the left about to pull the rope that will hoist the flag. Some of the boys wear knickers and ties; all are the picture of well-behaved youngsters. Even though the photographer’s intent was to make the picture look natural, the arrangement of the boys and their posture suggest that he carefully posed the shot. The way the boys holding the flag are facing the camera and the symmetry with the boys holding the bugles indicate that the picture was set up. In addition to the subject matter itself, the well-organized composition of the image gives the viewer confidence that all is well and orderly at the asylum.

One photo from the Syracuse State asylum appeared in the 1922 annual report with the caption “Canning factory at work” (illus. 5.14). A more telling and appropriate caption might have read “Residents at Work at the Canning Factory.” This carefully constructed picture shows a dozen female residents outside a building preparing bushels of tomatoes for processing. The canning facility is in the rear, and other female residents are most likely canning in that building. All are wearing the same white, institutionally issued work outfits, including a cotton hat. As in the previous photograph, this image is carefully posed, its purpose to create the sense of industrious, orderly workers.

I leave the Syracuse State School photographs in order to take up another set of photographs from this genre, a collection of images taken by one of the most heralded and well-known photographers of the twentieth century, Margaret Bourke-White. In 1932, the wealthy philanthropist and eugenicist Mary Averell Harriman,⁹⁹ engaged Margaret Bourke-White to take pictures of Letchworth Village, an asylum for children and adolescents with intellectual disabilities that was located in the country north of New York City.¹⁰¹⁰ Harriman had been a trustee of Letchworth since its opening in 1911 and was a close associate of Charles Little, the institution’s superintendent. Little embraced Bourke-White’s willingness to assist the institution (Trent 1994, 225). When Bourke-White took the pictures, the United States was in the depths of the Depression, and funding for government services for people with mental disabilities was contracting. Letchworth had undergone an extensive building program, but it was becoming overcrowded and underfunded. Harriman and institutional officials were eager to show that their facility was contributing to the general welfare and living up to its official goal, which was to segregate mentally disabled inmates from the general population and make them productive.

Several of Bourke-White’s images of Letchworth Village bring to mind the asylum postcards discussed so far. She took commanding pictures of the most substantial buildings and the loveliest spots on the grounds. Illustration 5.15 shows a memorable formal photograph of the impressive administration building. Of all her images, this one was used most often in the institution’s publications and pamphlets. It was the only photograph in a 1933 New York State invitation sent to dignitaries for the opening ceremonies to lay the cornerstones for buildings at the facility. It was also the lead photograph in the twenty-sixth annual report.

Letchworth Village was located in a beautiful spot high in the hills overlooking the Hudson River. Bourke-White’s views of the grounds took advantage of the scenic location, and these photos became part of her Letchworth portfolio. They, too, were included in institutional public documents.

Given Bourke-White’s exceptional photographic eye and her mechanical expertise, her pictures are both technically and aesthetically far superior to the postcard images reviewed earlier. Nevertheless, she used the same conventions that supported the legitimacy of the institution by highlighting the splendor of the architecture and the grounds.

Unlike the great majority of the postcard images, however, most of Bourke-White’s photos feature inmates. Some even show close-ups. Although, as in the Gowanda photos discussed earlier, local postcard photographers occasionally had access to the interior of institutions, thereby allowing them to include inmates in their photos, most did not. Photographers hired by an institution were free to go about the grounds and interiors, but being given access did not mean that whatever they photographed would be published. Institution officials chose which pictures would be used for publicity purposes and which would not.

In the institutional pictures Bourke-White produced, the residents are actively engaged in productive activities, working in the laundry room, on the Letchworth Village farm, and in school learning occupational skills. Illustration 5.16 shows the young female residents of Letchworth lined up in class, each posed in the same position and wearing institutional uniforms. In illustration 5.17, young residents are busy working at looms producing handwoven cloth that was sold to visitors and through outside outlets. At Letchworth and other institutions, such craft industries were widely publicized. Photographers showed that residents could be productive even if working in a closely supervised institutional setting.

In an effort at being self-sufficient, asylums established farms where residents labored as a way of providing income to the institution as well as rehabilitation for the inmates. Illustration 5.18 shows Bourke-White’s photograph of young male residents of Letchworth Village, picks and shovels in hand, working on the farm.

The pictures that Bourke-White and other institutional photographers took show clean, well-dressed inmates happily engaged in labor. As illustration 5.18 reveals, their clothing and clean appearance are quite incongruous with the tasks in which they are engaged.

The major focus of institutional photography was to produce depictions of the inmates as potentially productive, useful citizens. Bourke-White’s images were an extension of the tradition of institutional photography that promoted the message that if institutionalized, possibly dangerous and certainly incapable people with disabilities could be tamed, even trained, they might eventually live more useful lives. Institutional images of people with mental disabilities presented them in a more positive light, but in that endeavor they hid the overcrowded, understaffed conditions that actually existed. In addition, they showed only those inmates who were the most attractive, those in programs, those who lived in the best sections of the facility.

The attempt to bring the injustice of such institutions to the public eye using photography has a history similar to that of administration-generated institutional photography.¹³¹³ As print technology improved, the mass distribution of pictures of institutional abuse appeared in newspapers as well as in brochures and investigative reports. The earliest use of photos to document abuse I have come across was in the Illinois General Assembly’s Investigation of Illinois Institutions in 1908 (Trent 1994, illus. 19). Conscientious objectors who were assigned to an institution for alternative service during World War II produced a visual portfolio of institutional atrocities.¹⁴¹⁴ More recently, in the early 1970s, the journalist Geraldo Rivera brought photographers into what was to become the symbol of abuse, Willowbrook State School for the intellectually disabled on Staten Island, New York. Rivera wanted to bring to the attention of a national audience the atrocities behind the walls of that institution.

In 1965, Burton Blatt, a professor of special education at Boston University¹⁵¹⁵ and an advocate for people with mental disabilities, recruited a neighbor, Fred Kaplan—a skilled professional photographer—to accompany him on visits to four state schools for the intellectually disabled in the eastern United States.¹⁶¹⁶ During his career, Blatt had visited many institutions and knew their directors as well as the squalid conditions that existed inside. His purpose was to document the horror within. He and Kaplan asked cooperative officials to show them the wards they were most ashamed of, those places where the most difficult residents resided—the ambulatory and most aggressive young adults. These wards were usually the most despicable, where brutality and filth were most obvious. Not wanting to change the staff’s behavior, Kaplan concealed his camera under his jacket.¹⁷¹⁷ Blatt distracted the staff so that Kaplan could shoot from his hip. Their photographic sojourn resulted in the heavily illustrated book Christmas in Purgatory (Blatt and Kaplan 1966). The introductory sentence of that book set the scene for the visual dreadfulness that was to come: “There is hell on earth, and in America there is a special inferno. We visited there during Christmas, 1965.”

Muckraking images such as Blatt and Kaplan’s do not emphasize the order and the structured activity, the facilities’ uniform dress and cleanliness. Instead, in them the viewer is confronted by bedlam, filth, and runaway chaos. In illustrations 5.20 and 5.21, taken from Christmas in Purgatory, the men on the ward are barefoot, some are naked; the ward is disorganized and completely out of control. The subjects of Blatt and Kaplan’s images are shown up close, slightly out of focus, with photographer-added blackouts over their eyes and genitals.

Muckraking photographs reveal a different form of photographic rhetoric. Rather than being neat and orderly, the people in them are shown as filthy and out of control. Rather than being clearly focused and carefully composed, the photos are chaotic, with people scattered helter-skelter within the frame. The snapping from the hip with a concealed camera produced pictures that were blurred, candid, and disordered. The pictures were both characteristic of the approach and in line with what the photographers hoped to produce, a view of institutions that revealed their chaos and abuse.

Institutional photographers produced images of people with disabilities who were well dressed and orderly; muckraking photographers, in contrast, created images of people who were naked and frenzied. Photographers presented the facilities that people with disabilities lived in as either therapeutic centers or snake pits. Many institutions could be photographed both ways at the same moment. All, even the most heralded, were cheered at one point and exposed at another, despite the fact that actual conditions did not change radically. Letchworth Village, the setting of Margaret Bourke-White’s photographic documentation, was later featured in a national exposé on the Dick Cavett Show. Asylum photography best illustrates how the pictures taken of disability are more a reflection of the perspective of those who take the images than of the people and institutions in the photographs.

1. The information in this section on asylum postcards is based on an article I wrote with Ann Marshall (Bogdan and Marshall 1997). I thank her for her contribution.

2. In the years of picture postcards’ greatest popularity, from 1905 to 1920, up to one billion were mailed annually (Dotterrer and Cranz 1982, 44), more than ten times the US population. And the number mailed represents only a fraction of those bought. People passed on cards by hand, enclosed them in envelopes with letters, and purchased them for their own collections.

3. Because I compiled my collection in a haphazard way, I cannot make definitive statements about the representativeness of what I have compared to the universe of what exists. But there is no reason to believe that my collection is significantly different from what was produced in general. I report frequency counts and percentages in this discussion. Although these data may be of use in substantiating my findings, they must be read cautiously and in light of the way the collection was compiled.

4. Those institutions that served the mentally ill were referred to by such names as “insane asylum,” “state lunatic hospital,” “hospital for the insane,” “state hospital,” and just “asylum.” Those for the mentally retarded went by such names as “state home for the feeble-minded,” “state school,” “idiot asylum,” and “state training school” (Ferguson 1994; Trent 1994). Those designated for epileptics were called “epileptic village,” “state hospital for epileptics,” and “epileptic colony.”

5. Many of the illustrations in this chapter were colored postcards. They are shown in black and white here because the cost of including color images was prohibitive.

6. Half-tone and other ways of transforming photographs into plates that could be incorporated with text and run off on printing presses were used.

7. See Baynton, Gannon, and Bergey 2007 for many examples of institution photography.

8. Although I am not certain, all evidence I have been able to collect suggests that the photographer was William Allen.

9. The eugenics movement is discussed in chapter 6.

10. Margaret Bourke-White became a Life magazine photographer in 1936. One of her photographs was featured on the cover of Life’s first issue.

11. Ten of Bourke-White’s photographs of Letchworth appeared in that institution’s twenty-fourth annual report published in 1933 for the year 1932. Seven more were in the twenty-sixth annual report, and four others were in the thirtieth annual report. The reports can be found in the New York Library in Albany, New York.

12. We do not know what the exact conditions at Letchworth Village were when Margaret Bourke-White took her photographs, but Letchworth Village was later part of Geraldo Rivera’s documentary showing the horrors inside state institutions.

13. There is a long history of people trying to bring the terrible conditions in these institutions to the public’s attention. In the 1840s, Dorothea Dix visited various asylums and exposed institutional abuse.

14. Steven Taylor (2009) gives an account of various muckraking magazine articles published in the 1940s through the 1960s.

15. Blatt was a professor at Boston University at the time of the visits, but in the early 1970s he moved to Syracuse University, where he was the chair of the Special Education Department and later the dean of the School of Education.

16. Blatt and Kaplan visited a fifth institution that they chose because of its progressive practices.

17. The officials had given them permission and even led them to the wards with the worst conditions. Concealing the camera allowed Blatt and Kaplan to hide their picture taking from ward staff, who might have altered their behavior and in other ways covered up the conditions.


Featured Aspect	% of Author’s Asylum Cards That Feature This Aspect

Buildings	56
Institution from a Distance	27
Grounds	7
Gate or Entrance	3
Multiviews (collage)	3
Interiors	2
Other	2