Photography is a wonderful tool because it can capture what is there right in front of the camera, and preserve that moment that had just occurred in the past for future viewers. It is not always great at capturing what was once there, but it can sometimes gather evidence of things left behind or lingering in the background. The camera’s eye is more nuanced than ours, and with the ability to leave the shutter open for extended periods of time, you can capture more detail in dark places, the colors become more intense, and the darkness is brought into the light. Trying to capture things that once happened in a place can be difficult, but often when events have occurred in places over extended periods of time, or when traumatic things happen, a place can still hold signs of that trauma or history. One of those places where people once lived and where trauma likely occurred was the Camarillo State Hospital. In 1934 the Camarillo State Hospital opened to serve the mentally ill of California. It would go on to operate for many decades and care for thousands of patients until the state finally shut the doors in the late 1990’s. Soon after the hospital was closed the California State University took it over and developed a new campus in the CSU system. In 2002 CSU Channel Islands would become the 23^rd campus in the CSU system. I went to school there and graduated with a degree in English Literature in 2006.

I was among one of the first graduating classes at the new university, and back then it was still a very small school and had a very small student body. It was easy to walk around the campus and stroll into little secret courtyards and stare into the old windows of those commanding buildings. However, these structures and doors and windows all had something peculiar about them. The windows had metal grills on the outside, the walls were thick and unusually tall, and the doors were huge and heavy with massive bulky locks on them. And as soon as you were on campus you could sense a certain vibe that recalled the campus’ former history as a state mental facility. In addition to the imposing Mission Revival buildings, the setting was quite unique as well. The original hospital was built away from people on purpose, and it sits in a part of the Santa Monica Mountains where there are jagged hills full of native plants and prickly pear cactus. The wide expanse of the Oxnard plain borders the campus on the other side, and the Pacific Ocean lies just a few miles away. The whole place has a magical realism to it.

It took me a good year and a half to shoot all of the places I wanted to, and there were some rooms and places, that I could just never get into because of locked doors and restricted access. If you go there today you can feel a lot of different things as you walk around there. The natural setting alone, with the fingers of the volcanic ends of the Santa Monica Mountains coming down to meet the Oxnard plain and the salt air on the horizon, is enough to make for a lovely walk any day. There are native Dudleya plants growing out from the Spanish tiles on the roof. The hospital was built out on the fringes by design, away from society and development, which ensured that today the campus is in a really beautiful place. The photographs here in this book I hope capture some of that history, and are representative of a place where people lived and died, where some bad things probably happened to good people, and where good people tried to help those that nobody else would. Unfortunately, today on the campus you won’t find much of anything describing all that has happened there. It was a state hospital for almost 70 years and was a home to many people for many years. I believe that those who were brought there and went through emotional and physical trauma, as well as those who worked there to try and ease that trauma, deserve some recognition. There is one small little plaque on the far end of campus, but one would really have to look for it in order to find it. These images represent those physical objects in our world that contain some evidence or energy of what once occurred in that place. As I walked around that campus documenting the old hospital I found that those old walls did hold something both mysterious and real.