Loading...
Long Grove Asylum Medical Journal
Daly, Tim
Daly, Tim
Citations
Altmetric:
Advisors
Editors
Other Contributors
Affiliation
EPub Date
Publication Date
2019
Submitted Date
Collections
Other Titles
Abstract
The piece documents the disposal of a large scale Edwardian asylum complex that closed in 1992. I documented the aftermath of the site from 1993-98, before private development into an executive housing estate. Unbeknownst to me and at the same time, county archivist Julian Pooley was rescuing abandoned documents, medical journals, ephemera and artefacts from the same location. These would later be housed in the Surrey History Centre in Working. The work is a coming together of these two collections with new documentary photographs of the estate as it is today. The work takes the form of a dossier, styled as a large medical journal and contains multiple elements which can be viewed in any order. Alongside photographs taken in situ are photographs of the artefacts held in the archives, creating an unusual mixture of primary and secondary documentation. Within the dossier are details from large hand-written registers left abandoned at the site, chronicling the patient journey from admission onwards. In addition to these formal records, the dossier also includes ephemera relating to the hospital's social programme, a portfolio of curiously redacted press photographs, team photographs of the medical staff, maps and patients personal effects all of which were left abandoned.
Citation
Daly, T. (2019). Long Grove Asylum Medical Journal. Artist's book. Presented at Light Sensitive Material conference (2019). AHRC/University of West London.
Publisher
Journal
Research Unit
DOI
PubMed ID
PubMed Central ID
Type
Show/Exhibition
Language
Description
The book was presented as part of the Artist's Programme at the Light Sensitive Material conference, convened by Professor Michelle Henning (University of Liverpool) and Dr Junko Theresa Mikuriya (University of West London). The conference aim is as follows:
The fields of photography theory and history have in recent years moved away from the assumption of a break between the analogue and digital image to a more nuanced understanding of both past and contemporary photographic practices, images, and technologies.
Increasingly photography is discussed in relation to other media, to industry and markets and to climate and the environment. At the same time questions of aesthetics and interpretation are recast and understood in terms of sensual, haptic, embodied and everyday encounters with material images.
This conference will examine photography as simultaneously material and immaterial, addressing not only the tangible properties of photographic objects, but also the ecosystems in which they circulate.
We live in and through the photographic, in its physical presence in the world, and in our thought. The conference thus also invites considerations of the ways in which a mode of philosophical thinking can be conceived as photographic or vice versa.