Catherine Yass's photographs of interiors in a Surrey psychiatric institution cut across a long history of attempts to represent the insane in such buildings. Her images explore the architecture of a particular mental hospital and the representation of altered states of perception. Just as importantly, however, they offer a meditation on the nature of photography itself, which Yass develops our of, and eventually beyond, the apparent subject matter of the images.
      The development of photography runs parallel to the foundation and growth of the Victorian asylum in Britain in the early nineteenth century. The medical treatment of the insane, at that time, had acquired a new optimism. After centuries of superstition and demonisation of mental illness, the nineteenth century alienist or psychiatrist had begun to improve the living conditions of their patients. Following the lead of Dr W. A. F. Browne in Scotland, this new breed of 'moral therapist' constructed asylums across Britain which were bright, airy and spacious - designed to encourage the moral and physical development of the mentally ill housed within.
      This concern with the design of the patients' living conditions was accompanied by a fascination with the appearance of the patients themselves. The late eighteenth-century revival of the art of physiognomy, or the study of facial expression had made a strong impact in the new field of psychiatry. It laid the foundation for a psychiatric evaluation of the patient's personality based on a reading of his or her's facial characteristics.
      To facilitate such work, artists were commissioned by leading psychiatrists to draw portraits of cross-sections of the patient population in various hospitals. In this climate, the advent of photography seemed to offer the perfect extension of this field of research. The camera, it appeared, was an objective instrument for measurement and recording. Psychiatrists hoped that its mechanical precision would capture facial tics or characteristics which might reveal symptoms or the inner suffering of the patient.
      Among the most technically advanced of these doctors was Dr Hugh Welch Diamond, medical superintendent of the Surrey County Asylum - the same institution in which Catherine Yass took her photographs over 100 years later. Diamond had long held an interest in the development of the early photographic processes and had founded a Calotype club. It was only natural that, when he took up his post in the Asylum, he would turn to the patients as subjects.
      Over a period of ten years, Diamond recorded the hospital's inmates in a series of 'before' and 'after' photographs - distraught, dishevelled patients before, and well-dressed, serene men and women after their cure. The photographs stand as a vital record of nineteenth century medical practice but fail to reveal much of the inner life of the patients. Diamond's case histories of mania or depression can be read into the portraits he made only because he exaggerates the ragged, desperate appearance of the people he photographed. Even then, it became clear that the face and posture of a patient only revealed superficial information about an illness. The inner mental experience of the person remained distant and unknowable.
      Other sporadic experiments with photography in psychiatric institutions took place up until the 1920s at least and each project confirmed the impossibility of bridging that gap between appearance and experience. It is ironic then, that just as those hospitals are being run down and closed, Catherine Yass succeeds in creating a radically different perspective on the subject.
      Her photographs of the empty corridors and interiors of the Surrey hospital reveal a Victorian architecture that would have been familiar to Dr Diamond's inmates. Viewing her pictures, we are aware of the presence of psychiatric patients although none are visible in the images. In a sense, Yass compels us to identify with the eye of the camera, substituting ourselves for the missing patients. We look down the same corridors that countless mentally ill people have traversed for over a century.
      The photographs, composed from the layering of similar positive and negative colour images, present us with intensified, hallucinatory views of the hospital. The boundaries between walls, windows and floors are indistinct, blurred in a vision that is simultaneously sinister and sacred. The effect is to render the corridors of the hospital dreamlike - the result of sedatory drugs perhaps, or an altered state of consciousness. The asylum architecture becomes an inner architecture of the mind, the labyrinths of the brain coiling in on itself in a seductive haze.
      What Catherine Yass manages to suggest with this technique is the interior psychological experience of an altered perception of reality. There is an obvious contrast with the images of Dr Diamond and the psychiatrists who followed him, in Yass' shift from the reproduction of external appearance to internal perception. As she confronts that medical tradition, the paradoxes of her photographic technique find greater resonances in the traditional iconography of insanity. The catch-call of Diamond, Dr Browne and the other nineteenth century medical reformers was 'Let there be light' - the image of reason restoring the sick mind. Sunlight, enshrined in their new asylum architecture, was opposed to the shadowy labyrinths of the 'moon-struck', or lunar, lunatic. Yass' images, combining positive and negative in each photograph evoke and further complicate that iconography. The absence of patients and their implied presence behind the eye of the camera reinforce the sense of paradox at work in the photographs.
      On another level, these images also work to create a sense of timelessness. For Dr Diamond and other photographic pioneers, it was the photographs power to capture a particular moment of time which was of primary importance and photography, since its inception, has always had a strong documentary element. The intense actuality of the chemical trace of light from a given moment in time has become almost a sacred principle in the photographic arts.
      In Catherine Yass' pictures of Surrey hospital, however, that sense of specific time is challenged. The Victorian architecture, the combining of negatives and positives, and the blurring of perception in her photographs eliminate any sense of linear history. Perhaps it is the distinct absence of sunlight and its deliberate negation which causes this effect.
      In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes writes that

The Photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been ... the Photograph's essence is to ratify what it represents.

Barthes is arguing that a photograph must, by it nature, record a specific physical phenomena in front of the camera lens - even if the picture is subsequently doctored, it will remain based on the chemical trace of the actual light and objects present when the photograph was made.
      Catherine Yass' photographs do retain these actual traces of light but they do not ratify the objects or places they represent. Her combination of positive and negative films and, in particular, her use of colour film questions the whole nature of how we see the world before us.
      In a black and white world, the ratio of light and darkness is quite clear and easily assimilated. With colour, however, there is no definite consensus. Humans do not see colours in the same way as they see light and darkness and it is impossible to know if we all see the same thing when, for instance, we agree that something is red. Unlike cameras, our eyes do not just measure wavelengths of light. We judge colors in a relative way, comparing them to one another and revising according to the time of day, light source, memory. Our eyes work with ratios of color, not with absolutes. Consequently, it would be more accurate to say that colour doesn't occur in the world, but in the mind.
      Yass' emphasis on the rhetorical nature of photography highlights the uncertainty of any agreement on what we all see in her photographs. Her work raises important philosophical questions about what it means to know something, and whether there are simple perceptual truths that people share. If a man who is colour-blind sees her photographs, for example, will he see the same thing as the person next to him? From this point we can begin to ask questions about the possibility of consensus on the interpretation of any work of art.
      The extraordinary power of this sequence of photographs by Catherine Yass lies in the conjunction of the subject matter - the corridors of a mental hospital - and the underlying philosophical interrogation of human perception. Surrey hospital is a building where certain sections of the population have been declared unwell because their perception of the world is different than that of society. Catherine Yass extends the question to ask how do we determine that 'shared vision' which defines society.

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