About the Artist

Hi, my name is Sarah and I am from Philadelphia. I am a mother, daughter, and friend to many, and I have an Associate degree in Psychology and a degree in drafting. In my work, I advocate for improved mental health care and reducing the stigma surrounding mental illness. I have also worked as a junior mechanical design engineer. My interests include art, photography, the history of mental health, preservation, and architecture. As a way to raise awareness for more humane treatment and modern mental health care, I document defunct mental health institutions. Through my hobbies, I have gained a new perspective on human rights.

This type of art can be both thought-provoking and controversial as it tells a story about the past and encourages people to consider mental illness in a different light. While I am passionate about making a positive impact on the world, I also recognize that a picture can simply be a picture and that interpretation is subjective. I strive to be professional and share my art and ideas with others, but I also try not to take myself too seriously and recognize that I am not an organization, but simply a person with a unique perspective.

Bullying and Hate

This website is a space for creativity, education, inclusivity, respect, and safety for all. I strive to create a positive experience for my visitors and do not allow hate or bullying in the comment section. All comments are carefully reviewed before they are approved or denied for publication. If you wish to bully or harass me privately, you can contact me at admin@photadytablog.com.

About the Name

Okay, we’re going to get a little deep here. I was thinking really hard on coming up with a name for a website a long time ago and I was reading about ancient temples and what went on in there. I like weird stuff.

The word explains the relationship of us to the physical structure of the building. In Latin, an adytum is a sacred and restricted area within the cella of a temple; the sanctum sanctorum; the holy sanctuary. It’s a room that no one’s allowed to enter – totally off limits. The cella was dark, secret, and underground. But all in all, it’s just brick and mortar. What’s really intriguing is what the humans are up to inside of those buildings. How does our relationship with architecture help us understand human behavior?

The adytum is the most sacred part of a temple where oracles took place. Special humans would lock themselves inside, gnaw on hallucinogenic plants, and try to predict things and/or receive prophecy. I don’t like it when only one person gets to have all the fun. I needed to understand more about this strange privilege.

There were lots of patients locked up in buildings, hidden from the public, and treated very badly. No one knew what was going on in there and no one cared to look. In modern times, instead of relying on one man to lock himself away and hallucinate on his knees to speak to God, we have a sanctuary within us, and we communicate with God directly. We don’t listen to one person tell us what to think or believe – we think for ourselves and believe what we choose. That which was inaccessible is now accessible to all. The hospitals were exposed, and horrified humans demanded answers, transparency, and change.

Anyway, photography and adytum come together as “inaccessible photography” or “photography of the inaccessible” of which is sacred. The history of mental health care is scarce and often taboo. The truth is swept under the rug. Instead of continuing to go along with it, we bring the darkness to light. We can learn from our mistakes. It doesn’t have to be a secret and we can inspire positive change.

I love analogies. I thought this was a cool concept. I like the word, so I made it my own. It works. I love it. I wouldn’t change it for anything.

About the Site

This website exists to share the history of the locations in which the photographs were taken and to flaunt the derelict beauty of the desolate wards, morgues and operating rooms of shuttered state hospitals or the occasional work rooms, engine rooms, and locker rooms of long-forgotten factories.

Nature always takes back, in the sense that everything built up will eventually fall down. Buildings are similar to people, because they both have a story to tell, and this website helps to tell that story.

Most of the existing locations may be referred to by their pseudonym to protect their physical welfare, because they are historical institutions that played an important role in the history of our culture and are susceptible to destruction.

This website is also for sharing my art. It’s not just for raising awareness, discussing history, or reducing the stigma of mental illness, etc. I’m a very expressive and creative person and this is an outlet for me to share those things. I really love transforming memories into art.

If anything is of important interest to you, feel free to email me. I like to talk.

How beautiful look earth and heaven again, as we emerge from the gloom! It might not be unprofitable, now and then, to send us mortals, the dissatisfied ones at least, and that’s a large proportion, into some tunnel of several days’ journey. We’d perhaps grumble less, afterward, at God’s handiwork

Walt Whitman describing the Atlantic Avenue tunnel

History of Urban Exploration

In the early twentieth century, the social scientists, otherwise known as anthropologists, searched for a new understanding of ethnicity, poverty and self-image. During this time, the urban Anthropologists formed a community to investigate and collaborate information taken from the dwellers in the rookeries, which is a slum area frequented by criminals, prostitutes, paupers and lunatics. These Social Reformers explored and mapped out the diseased spaces, which threatened the health of the social community.

The fever dens, nurseries of felons and the colonies of paupers included confined spaces, hidden recesses, narrow turnings, dark alleys and shadowy corners, which were plagued with disease. The slums were viewed as a cancer eating away at the established social structure and the urban explorers were social reformers who searched for an antidote

William Booth, George Sims and Henry Mayhew were three early urban explorers proficient in journalism and were prolific in writing about their urban adventures. Mayhew referred to himself as an urban investigator-as-explorer who wrote reports for the Morning Chronicle. Mayhew was a traveler in the undiscovered country of the poor. When man had nothing new to discover, he turned inward and rediscovered his territory, creating concepts to lower the poverty level, while taking notes on modern human behavior and social interaction.

The explorer strolled the city in order to experience and understand the new urban era. He was a detached observer combining sociological, anthropological, literary and historical notions of the relationship between the individual and the greater populace of the city.

The anonymity of the explorer was merely a ruse; a play of masks without which the explorer could not transform into the beautiful raw stuff he witnessed. The explorer puts on whichever mask will gain him access to otherwise secret and mysterious places. For him, everything is vacant and if certain places seem closed, it is only because in his eyes they are not worth visiting.

The language of urban exploration carefully played down the special nature of the explorer and emphasized the explorer’s willingness to delve below the surface in order to brave the risks of fever and other injuries to his health.

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Didn’t I See You Somewhere?

The Philadelphia Inquirer: Exploring Abandoned Industrial Hulks

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Favorite Quotes

“When we watch a film, we are asked to participate in new intellectual and emotional structures of understanding. At least for the time of the viewing experience (and to the extent we yield ourselves to it rather than defending ourselves against it), our consciousnesses are altered. Our nervous systems are reprogrammed. Our range of sensitivities is subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) shifted. We are made to notice and feel things we wouldn’t otherwise. But one doesn’t get to a new place without leaving old positions behind, and, as the anecdote takes for granted, the process of being exposed to new ways of knowing can present a bit of shock to the system. The films can only teach us new understandings by forcibly denying us old ones, and that can be bewildering. They can freshen and quicken out responses by altering our habitual modes of perception, and that can be disorienting. Their stylistic defamiliarizations and assaults are their way of doing this, and it is only to be expected that they should make us more than a little uncomfortable at moments. That, of course, is where any artist of sufficiently large ambitions risks getting into trouble with his public.”

Raymond Carney

“If Shakespeare were writing today, I don’t think he would use a quill pen – so I started going out and taping with tape recorders and filming to see if uh, people talk like they do in novels, and they don’t.”

Ken Kesey

It’s important that a film is loud and I hope many people agree. You should be inside of a film when you go into a theater. It shouldn’t be way up the front of you. It should surround you, envelope you, so you can live inside a dream. And that’s the way it should be, in my opinion

David Lynch

Men have travelled, and fought, and got besieged, and shut themselves up among the paupers, and done many strange things before this, for the mere purpose of writing books about their doings. But I feel sure that no man ever submitted to be treated as a lunatic with that view; for if he had he might never have escaped, had he seen as sane as I, to tell his story.

Herman Charles Merivale

More Art

Redbubble

I spend so much of my free time illustrating just about anything. You can see this puddle of art on Redbubble.

Social Media

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