Christopher Payne, a photographer from New York City, specializes in the documentation of America's vanishing architecture and industrial landscape. A trained architect who has documented structural forms for the National Park Service and produced drawings for scholarly excavations of Greco-Roman sites, Payne will be presenting work from his much-anticipated new book of images, Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals (MIT Press, 2009), the result of a six- year exploration of America's vast and largely abandoned state mental institutions. Join us for a guided photographic tour of these spaces, and a discussion of the social, medical, architectural, aesthetic and historiographic issues raised by such work. This event, co-sponsored by the Department of English Language and Literature, the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, the Center for the History of Medicine, the Victor Vaughan Society, the Institute for the Humanities, and the Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshops, is free and open to the public.