Suitcases...
This is totally, brilliantly haunting... a photographic collection of the suitcases found when the Willard Psychiatric Center in New York closed in 1995 - and the contents (where there are any)... a tiny, tiny window into the people who brought the cases and their belongings with them when they were admitted from 1910-1960 (at which time it was a centre for the 'chronically insane', so many never left...)
Some cases are empty or nearly so (it was unclear how many of the things they brought they could keep with them, and how many stayed in the case in storage) but many have the odd sort of small, personal items that give me the same frisson of vague melancholy mixed with a feeling of, not quite nostalgia, but dark-tinted memory, my own or those I've touched through books and media and history... and that unmistakable chilly touch that anything to do with old asylums always brings. The little ornamental dogs Thelma brought, Mary's beautiful embroidery, Anna's lovely clothes carefully listed, Frank's phone booth pictures of unknown friends, Eleanor's sewing kit and charming perfume bottle, Crispin's zither, Dmytre's wedding photo and the actual artificial flowers his wife carried in the photo... and the even tinier things, old-fashioned toiletries, notebooks, bibles, clocks, combs, labels, cutlery... the detritus of ordinary lives.
And I can't help wondering... what would be in my suitcase, left long after I was gone...