For the fate of a boobhead is
That men do him bind
And plant him in the digger
Till he goes out of his mind

James K. Baxter

Chambers is a photographic study of the interiors of prisons and psychiatric hospitals of New Zealand, in sites both active and abandoned to ruin. There are no people in these images, but this project is nevertheless about presence. I seek to express the palpable and visceral emotional atmosphere present within the cells and corridors, their complex and often disturbing psycho-geographical resonances.

Many years ago while on holiday in Malta, having scaled a wall and pushed through a small gap in a deserted thirteenth century observation tower, I found myself in a tiny, dark room. On the wall was an invocation in blood-red graffiti and a twisted hook, hanging from which was a clotted piece of rope. The room felt deeply unpleasant and expressive of a lingering sickness and violence. I took a photograph and left hurriedly. Afterwards, I felt as though I had visited a plague site and taken a sample of contagion for study.

Some time later, I broke into an abandoned courthouse in New Zealand to see if it might make a good location for a commercial shoot. In the basement, knee deep in polluted water, I entered a series of dank holding cells. As my torchlight reflected off the water, gang symbols hovered like graffiti specters on the walls and ceiling. I imagined I could hear the wet echo of bodies smashing themselves against the bars. I continued to be haunted by this space long after leaving and knew that it held secrets, some hidden history I wasn’t supposed to know or be curious about. I wanted to capture this photographically in order to determine if somehow the spirit of the environment could be rendered outside of the space itself. I returned with a 35mm camera and flash, but this only yielded a thin representation. What I wanted was to capture the greatest depth of detail possible, in the hope that it might somehow convey the almost crushing emotion that lingered in those cells. Soon after, however, the building was demolished and replaced by luxury apartments.

The seed was sown though, and I sought out similar spaces to document in what became an exhaustive examination that stretched over five years and took me all over the country. The challenge of capturing greater detail was ultimately resolved when I started to shoot on large format. Longer exposures gave me the sense that I was absorbing the spaces onto the film, and printing the images at close to life-size gave a visceral sense of being in the spaces. At last, the walls started to talk.

From the start of the project, I entered and explored - not always with official sanction - a wide variety of deserted courthouses, hospitals and borstals. Ultimately, I decided to focus on psychiatric hospitals and prisons, feeling these environments to be the pinnacle (or nadir) of the institutional experience. It would be an understatement to say that this experience was both fascinating and frightening. One abandoned psychiatric ward I visited had been broken into and vandalized in an apparent whirlwind of violence. It was as if whomever had breached the space had tapped into a dormant mainline of madness and externalized it in direct and perverse action. By contrast, another mental institution had been emptied and sealed shut many years before on its last day of operation, and I became the first person to enter it since. The swirling energy of the first was nauseating, while the second was terrifyingly still and oppressive. In due course, I began to wonder what added emotional ‘tonality’ inhabited spaces might reveal? I decided to widen my focus to include operating institutions, so as to further comprehend the emotional and physical geometries of privation and submission.

Shooting in functioning prisons proved to be another experience altogether, one not suited to the faint-hearted. The abandoned buildings I entered often felt infected, as if by some psychic disease. But I was only dealing with ghosts. The spirit was similar in the active institutions, but amplified by the breath of the compressed, sweating and ill-fed living. Some were like zoos, pulsing with shouts and taunts. Others were quieter, conveying the sense that I had entered a congested anatomy. The only maximum-security prison in New Zealand, Paremoremo, was shaped like a giant concrete sarcophagus and evidenced a tight air of entrenched brutality. I felt as if I was in a minefield, my every step measured so as not to cause a detonation. After my first visit there, I found myself sitting in my car with my hands shaking uncontrollably. It occurred to me that I had been standing close enough to smell the deodorant of a man who only weeks before had brutally raped a woman and beaten her to death with his bare hands. Invariably I left these institutions feeling immensely affected. They took their toll on me.

What I came to realize is that everything in these spaces conforms to the architecture - even sunlight is bounced or blocked by bars and walls. Inside, people are forced to eat off, shit into, and sleep on steel bolted to concrete walls. They are perpetually watched by cameras, warned by innumerable staccato notices, and measured and counted beyond practical necessity. Whatever their respective crimes may be, the collective experience of inmates is intentionally purgatorial. The human response is often an assertion of self, be it made via shouts and growls, impassioned pleas, gallows humor, borrowed lyrics, quasi-legal submissions, or flung fluid. But when these communications cease, the spaces still speak. They speak via line-ups of food and possessions, via thin mattresses shaped by stressed bodies, via words violently scratched into concrete walls, via – as Nick cave would have it – the presence and sense of “objects and their fields”. Even in deserted spaces, the tendrils of fauna surround but cannot consume the walls of authority’s skeleton.

I want Chambers to offer testament to the experience of confinement and the legacy of confinement. It serves also as a form of historical record, since many of the buildings photographed have by now been demolished. Graffiti and art on walls offer insights into personal mythologies and ephemeral subcultures, just as evolving architectural approaches reflect the changing philosophies of state control. In so far as was possible, my role was to act as a conduit for these details, both evident and felt, and to treat them as sacrosanct, beyond political or personal viewpoint. I did not light these spaces artificially and I never moved a single item. I did not photograph inmates or patients, as I felt their presence would interfere with viewers’ responses to the spaces themselves. Chambers is not an exercise in voyeurism, but rather, immersion. I want viewers to place themselves within the space pictured.

I have also come to consider this investigation – one that at times felt like a compulsion - as a journey into territories that others close to me have occupied or been mired in. I ran with a rough crowd at school, many of whom were ultimately sent to prison or psychiatric hospitals. Also, my mother spent many agonizing weeks alone in hospital as a child with polio and my father was in a forced labor camp in German-occupied Holland during the Second World War. The Holocaust greatly affected him and he greatly affected me. There is some sense that I have inherited demons, and I am fascinated by the places where demons must be faced.

New Zealand is thought of by many as some sort of paradise, but the relatively recent and bloody colonial ingression still casts a shadow into the present, and the relationship between the European-Pakeha state and the indigenous Maori population remains raw and painful. Incarceration can be seen as the most explicit commonplace expression of state domination, and proportionate to their wider demographic distribution, Maori are wildly over-represented in the prison population. Moreover, the rate of imprisonment in New Zealand is second only to America in the Western world. While New Zealanders were once viewed as a people well supported by a ‘nanny’ state, prevailing orthodoxies have set the populace at odds and significantly broadened the gap between rich and poor. A rising tide of crime and changing fiscal focus has led to the privatization of prisons and the “deinstitutionalization” of the mental health-care system. Only a handful of clinics remain to treat the mentally ill and mental health patients are often sent to overcrowded prisons or dispatched to ‘self-care’ in increasingly dystopian urban twilight zones. Whilst my primary intention with Chambers is to engage with viewers on a visceral and personal level, the photographs are necessarily imbued with the sense that New Zealand has failed some core test of nationhood. I should add that New Zealand is far from alone in its failings, and that while these images are of New Zealand institutions the issues and emotions raised by them are near to universal.