Picture of day

Photographer Christopher Payne recently shared with Dwell some images from his book Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals, and boy are they something. Christopher spent six years documenting these amazing old buildings where in 1948 more than half a million people were being kept. To say the buildings are lavish is an understatement. While the occupants may or may not have been able to appreciate them, these buildings are magnificent.

Honestly they’re still kind of spooky as shit, but there’s something about abandoned buildings that for some reason tend to resonate with people. To think that these buildings were bustling with life in the last hundred years is remarkable.