Woodlands

Please preview the entire book here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/shoes_on_wires/sets/72157612438830074/detail/

An exploration of the inside of one of Greater Vancouver's most troubling landmarks, the abandoned "school" for the mentally handicapped (and our province's first insane asylum), before flames destroyed the complex in 2008. The photos were taken over three visits, and the book also contains a bit of historical data and floorplans.

"This place aches so intensely, filling you with loss and time and lives gone by and forgotten. Walk into the wreckage of a room and you are blindsided by it, a tangible feeling in the gut, a wrenching dislocation. A chair on its side, a crumpled birthday card, the unidentifiable drifts of matter that accumulate in the
corners - detritus, debris, shreds of previous lives that once were so important and now are fragmenting, splintering, becoming dirt.
It's the echo of that self-imposed importance, the holding up of that against your own life, a meeting head-on with the impermanence of all that you hold dear and important, the realization that this too shall turn to dust. These places are so profoundly important, so necessary to remind us to hang on to the things we love while they and we are still here."