Talk of the Nation
Ari Shapiro, who is guest-hosting NPRs Talk of the Nation saw the Slate piece on the suitcases and thought it might be a good idea to have me on the show. So, this coming Monday at 3.40 pm Eastern time I will be interviewed, and there will probably be some time for phone calls. I am so pleased that the project is getting so much positive attention. / Welcome to all the recent guests to this site. I would also like to add a note to all of you who have taken the time to comment here, or send me email. I am really touched by the stories of your own connection to the asylums and to mental illness. I always attempt to respond to you all, but lately I have really been inundated with mail due to the recent attention the cases have received. Over the next few weeks, I will be cutting back on my other responsibilities to focus primarily on this project. So if you haven’t heard back from me yet, I’ll hope to be in touch soon.
Slate Magazine
Slate Magazine ran a really nice piece on the Willard Suitcase project. Here’s the link. Big thanks to David Rosenberg for his interest and doing a great job choosing and laying out the photos. / When I was recently in San Francisco I stayed at this place. It is a great old building and the staff are loads of fun.
Printing
On Thursday Peggy came over to help me edit for the Exploratorium exhibit. We had a very productive day and nailed down our final choices. I started printing yesterday morning and have worked pretty steadily until a few minutes ago. I still have some that I will probably reprint tomorrow, but for all intents and purposes I am done for now. All my prints are 12 inches wide, and my great friend Alex Ross has been printing the seven or eight 36 inch wide prints. It feels great to be so close to putting everything into a giant fedex box and sending them to San Francisco.
Telegraph Article
The Lucy Davies article about the suitcases is now online. Here is the link to the story. And here is the link to the slideshow. It is getting quite a bit of response. / Things are moving along at the Exploratorium. It is all about working with a committee, so it feels a bit different, but when done, it is going to be very interesting. / The 14 suitcases arrived safely last week in these lovely blue shipping containers and are being prepped for display. It is all quite exciting.
Sunday Telegraph Magazine
I almost forgot. Tomorrow’s (10 February, 2013) London Sunday Telegraph Magazine “Seven” will feature an article on the project written by Lucy Davies. I haven’t seen it yet, but check it out if you are in the UK.
San Francisco
Hey everyone, tomorrow I fly to San Francisco to help plan how my portion of the “Changing Face of What is Normal” exhibit will be hung. (Providing Logan in Boston is open for business. We had 20 inches of snow here in Western Massachusetts overnight, and Boston got totally wailed.) I’ll try to post daily from out there. I don’t know how much free time I will have, if any, but if you are in the area and want to meet up for a brief visit, just send me an email. It might work. This photo is from Flora T’s case. I think I published it in an earlier post, but lately this image has been sticking with me. The print I made is absolutely beautiful.
The Amazing Beverly Courtwright
I have always given primary credit to Craig Williams for saving the Willard suitcases, and his contribution to the preservation of these objects was enormous. But if it wasn’t for Beverly Courtwright’s connection to Willard and her tremendous respect for the patients and their lives, the cases would have been lost forever. On Saturday I got the chance to meet her for the first time, and thanks to the corrections folks who now control the site, we were allowed to go into the attic for a few minutes. It is behind this door that in May of 1995 Bev “rediscovered” the cases. She had become one of the Willard employees heavily involved with the transition team responsible for shutting down the psych center. As a storehouse clerk, part of her task was to go through all the buildings to determine what should be saved and what could be thrown out. She described the first time she opened this door and saw the cases stacked up as a surreal experience, and told me that she felt a “whoosh of energy” sweep over her.
She grew up in the area, and as a child remembers Willard patients coming to her home through the Family Care program that allowed for patients not in need of direct care to live temporarily in private homes.
This is what the attic now looks like when you walk through the door. The racks are on either side of the attic with men’s cases on one side and women’s on the other. When Bev was talking about being up here for the first time it literally gave me chills.
You can see the letters on the racks representing the first initial of the surname of each patient. Whomever set up the system did an amazing job. I find it so interesting that as in the residential parts of the buildings, men and women were segregated up here as well.
There were a very few items left behind that could not be linked to a specific patient. This coat was one of them. / As my work on this project continues, I am constantly overwhelmed by the people I meet and the stories that they have to tell. Late last night I got an email letting me know of a new comment on this post. Scroll down toward the bottom of the comments section and read what Stephanie had to say. / Getting into the attic and meeting Bev really tied together everything that I have been trying to say with my work on this project. She is a truly remarkable person with a huge heart and the ability to convey a great sense of connection to the people who were at Willard, and I just want to thank her for all she has done.
The Changing Face of What is Normal
For much of last week Stephanie Bailey from the Exploratorium in San Francisco has been at the museum picking out objects for the exhibit that will be also featuring my suitcase photographs. I went out to Rotterdam on Saturday to meet her and help out a bit. Karen Miller and Craig Williams were there as well. Details are mostly in place, and while there isn’t much information available on the web as of yet, the title of the exhibit is “The Changing Face of What is Normal”. In addition to my photos, there will be a number of Karen’s poems and around 15 of the suitcases themselves. I have seen the design for the display and it is going to be amazing. It will open on the 17th of April when the new Exploratorium itself opens in the Embarcadero on (I think) Pier 15. I will be there for the opening which should be a huge event. At some point in mid May I’ll come back out for some programming to do with the exhibit. And we are hoping to set up an “artists talk” sometime in the Autumn.
Some of the cases that are traveling to the exhibit were new to me and it was nice to see more of the possessions of the patients.
Madeline was a French teacher before she came to Willard. This is a very beautiful copy of an illustrated Petit Larousse.
Her little coffee pot is nice too. / It is amazing to me that some of the personal possessions of Willard patients will be shipped all the way across the country to be seen by a huge number of people. As I have tried to handle the objects with great care when photographing them, the Exploratorium is showing great sensitivity in the way they are preparing the exhibit. I really think it is going to be amazing. As I know more about the timing of things over the next few months, I will post updates. This will be an incredible and rare opportunity to see the cases up close. The exhibit will run for at least six months, and we are hoping to have it extended for a full year.
Willard Suitcases Update
Since Hunter’s “Collector’s Weekly” interview with me came out earlier this week, a lot of attention has been drawn to the suitcases project. He did such a great job capturing my voice and I am really grateful for his interest. It has suddenly opened up some very interesting new doors, and has driven a ton of traffic to this blog. Occasionally when people come here expecting to see suitcase photos, they see my other posts and get confused. It has been intentional on my part to mix up the suitcase updates with my other stuff because I want visitors to get an idea of who I am as a person and a photographer. But when someone comes here looking for Willard suitcases and sees a picture of my dog in the back of the car, they might be thinking something along the lines of WTF (as the kids say). I have been giving this a good think, and here’s my solution. I still want everyone to see everything, but to make it easier on people I will link to some of the earlier updates. So here we go: Dmytre, Frank, Flora, and some earlier ones: Charles, and the first one I ever shot which explains the genesis of the project, Frieda. For those of you new visitors who are adventurous and have some time on your hands, just click on the archive links to the right and wander around a bit.
I have received so many notes from people saying that they came to this site to look at the suitcases but were excited by what else they saw. And I want to thank you all for being interested in my work and my life.
Here’s a link that my friend Tom Bollier sent to me earlier today when it popped up on his Google reader. I had no idea that this was being done, but she did a nice job. More news to come soon, I hope.
Voting and Willard Suitcases
I like voting in my little town. Paper ballots, and it usually goes pretty smoothly. I asked if I could photograph in the booth but they said it was against the rules.
Just a note of welcome to all of you who read about my Willard suitcase project on the Collectors Weekly site. Those who haven’t seen the story can check it out here. Hunter did an amazing job and he asked great questions. I am very pleased. It even made it to Digg for a while yesterday. If you are new here and just want to see suitcase posts, check out October and work your way backwards. But I hope you will be interested in my other posts as well. Thanks, Jon
Jon Crispin's Notebook 
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