More Real Than Life

Max Houghton examines the fraught links between photography and madness in this monograph essay. Working with close readings of the transcripts of Mary Ellen Mark and Karen Folger Jacobs' interviews with the women in the state of Oregon's only locked psychiatric ward, she explores cultural concepts of haunting and delire, as well as the social and political consequences of male violence and abuse towards women. Taking Mark's legendary images as jumping off points, Houghton asks us to consider the fragile borders of sanity and reality in this journey from seeing to being.

• Organisation
• https://www.pentagram.com/work/ward-81-v...