Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital opened in 1875 and eventually housed nearly 10,000 patients, making it one of America’s largest state psychiatric institutions. Its history encompasses the rise and decline of institutional mental-health care, including controversial treatments such as electroshock, insulin therapy and lobotomy. Its population fell dramatically during deinstitutionalization beginning in the 1960s, leaving much of the historic complex abandoned. The massive main building was demolished in 2015.

I photographed Greystone for years before learning that one of my own cousins had been a patient in the still-active hospital. Research into another former patient, Woody Guthrie, led me into hospital records, photographs, paintings and interviews and eventually became Wardy Forty. Greystone was where photographing ruins began to turn into something larger for me: following the traces in a place until they led to people and stories.