Very Powerful Weapon (VPW)

Your camera, or rather the images it creates can be a powerful weapon...

A walk earlier, to try and get some air inside me and hopefully dislodge some (censored) from my respiratory system actually only had me coughing in fits of spasms and stopping frequently. I didn't even get as far as a mile...

Far enough to get to the local psychiatric hospital and I zoomed in on the crumbling details of the old buildings - and of course, our preconceived ideas and perceptions about such places and perhaps more so, the type of people who access their services.

I've purposefully concentrated on the warm, homely connotation that a stack of brick chimneys might conjure and framed it behind a whole heap of razor wire. The chimneys belong to a row of terraced houses linked together into one long ward for the long-term detained to make them feel 'more-at-home'.

Framing, selective colour and careful choice depth of field accentuated the idea and notion that this place fulfills our very worst nightmares - "mad" psychopathic killers who'd butcher you on the spot without thought are contained within and against their will....Makes for a reasonable Blip, too, on yet another DULLLLL grey day.

Except that all ths ferocious fencing is to keep people OUT, as this part of the hospital has been condemned and is an unsafe structure - there are all these visible hi-vis signs put up too. As I found out in a Civic Society meeting a while back, this whole site had grown sporadically, over a couple hundred years with some Victorian features (a fountain, for example, and a ballroom) being listed whilst additions in the prefab rage of the 60's had them torn down thirty years later due to their use of asbestos - patients often lived years in such environments.

So, it is now a property management hot potato, the NHS would just love to level these parts and sell the land for community housing - this plan has been umming and erring for years. Modern day units have been built and in operation for about 10-15 years now and whilst in its peak, during Victorian and Edwardian times, where there were thousands of locked up, thrown away patients living existing in their self-contained, isolated community, the numbers now are literally a few dozen.

So chillingly frightening now to hear in that Civic report that no-one will ever know of everybody that stayed/died there - records don't exist, even if they ever did. When an elderly ward closed, one old lady in her 80s was found to have been 'put-away' by her disgusted family for falling pregnant, the hospital management only found this out when they had to move her on and checking her history - she, who was now suffering dementia, thought that her fellow patients were her family ....There was even a secret tunnel underground to move people around and where female patients were spared the sight - and sound - of their male counterparts, lest they were further infected by the opposite sex.

So, as in my title, what you choose to portray and the story it conveys can be very manipulative... and yes, do check out your local 'mental health unit' (as they prefer to call themselves these days - you may well get some great photos and as I did, a unique record of a changing community - and society (just be prepared to RUN when a nurse comes out at you with a hyperdermic, though!)

Those who can get Sky Arts 1, then a docu about cult portrait snapper Robert Maplethorpe is on at 6.40pm. Details are here