Vanessa Haney

Space/Place (selected)

When I began this series, I had a job supporting HIV/AIDS prevention research, at a center associated with the New York State Psychiatric Institute. As part of my daily routine, I walked through two contrasting sites: the original 19th-century, Kirkbride-esque structure, with its complex history of “treatments,” now being repurposed as offices, and an adjoining late-1990s steel and corporate green-glass building. I thought about the history and effects of institutional “therapeutic” spaces and wondered how these charged environments could be documented ethically. I knew that I did not want to photograph people, to violate anyone's privacy, or to recycle tropes of decrepitude in long-abandoned psychiatric facilities. Photographing a range of structures of containment and “cure” from 2003 to 2010, in New York, Florida, and Indiana, I witnessed how some spaces were transformed by their inhabitants—through their own agency, using signage, art works, graffiti, and personal items of comfort—into “places” that expressed the agency of the people who inhabited then. And I witnessed how other spaces reflected the movement from psychotherapeutic to pharmacological models of care. My images work with juxtaposition and extended linear formats to evoke these histories.