david maisel: library of dust.

truly amazing work by photographer David Maisel in his work, “Library of Dust”,

Blogger Jeremy Elder writes:

The Oregon State Insane Asylum, as it was first named, opened in 1883. While it operated until the early 1970s, some of the patients who died within its walls, unclaimed by their families, were cremated and their remains were sealed inside copper canisters.

With nobody coming to collect them, the canisters were placed in a room on long pine shelves. That’s where they’ve sat, some for more than a century…in limbo. Always waiting. When Maisel was first allowed entry he found that the canisters, neatly numbered on top from 01 to 5118, had exploded with patterns. Leeched and corroded and etched minerals traced their way across them, each pattern completely unique. 5118 human souls refracting themselves, through metal, into colour. On his first visit, inmates from a local prison were brought in to clean the hallways and other areas surrounding the usually-locked room of canisters. One of the men looked in and whispered “the library of dust.” And so Maisel had the title for his project.

his profound musing have stayed with me since viewing this post:

The organic, elemental shapes they’ve taken are no coincidence. Denied their transference, they manifest outwards as visual embodiments of what they might have become: a river’s edge, a leaf curl, a glacier, the azure of sky, the stratus of a cloud, or the pure, stark light of an aurora borealis. Aquatic and terrestrial and celestial, they mimic all the things that have been held from them.