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Ward 81, Oregon State Hospital, Salem, Oregon, 1976
“In 1975, photographer Mary Ellen Mark was assigned by a magazine to do a story on the making of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, shot on location at the Oregon State Hospital, a mental institution. While there, she met, briefly, the women of Ward 81.
Ward 81 is the women’s security ward of the hospital, the only locked ward for women in the state. The women on this ward are considered dangerous to themselves or to others.
In February of 1976, Mary Ellen and Karen Folger Jacobs, a writer and social scientist, were given permission to live on the ward in order to photograph and interview the women. They spent thirty-six days on Ward 81.”
From Ward 81
Heat
The expanse
The lowness
The depth of a thick heat,
It engulfs but does not devour
It wraps but does not cling
It is clean,
It is love.
Listen to Open Space 2 by Snow Beard.
Listen to Moons by Snow Beard.
[O]ur maps have grown less speculative, less interested in the elemental possibilities of the Earth’s skin, and that suggests that the Earth has lost its capacity to keep secrets. We tend to look at them for what we want to avoid, rather than what, in good fortune, we might discover. There is not much mystery in a landcape we cannot enter.
“
| — | Robert Penn Warren, quoted in Robert Macfarlane’s Wild Places (via invisiblestories) |
