On Monday afternoon I went down to 3C International to meet photographer/filmmaker Tom Killick to see the images that he had made of the abandoned asylum. As I am unable to get access to the building at such short notice I found seeing the images that Tom had created to be extremely useful and gave me a better insight as to what it looks like and has given me some inspiration on what kind of images that I should make. Something that surprised me was that the building looks a lot more modern that I had anticipated, I had originally imagined it to be all decaying, dark and rotting brown/black walls. It was quite the opposite, with there being white walls and the building looked in better shape than I had first thought. I really hoped it would look a lot creepier and old as you would hope for an abandoned asylum, which would’ve made extremely fun staged images but it was a lot nicer than that. I found that in most of the photographs there was just disregarded furniture and files all left in massive piles. There was only one padded cell in the entire building which had been stripped when the building was first abandoned. The other rooms weren’t actually too bad and seemed to be ok living conditions, with a bed, sink and mirror. Some of the rooms had TV’s in them that were put behind a glass wall so that the patient wouldn’t brake it. For some reason I thought that the asylum would be really small and that there wouldn’t be many residents there but when looking through Tom’s photographs he showed me images of all of the files and paperwork of these people, many of which said RIP and there were mass piles everywhere. I was shocked at the amount of patient that the Jersey asylum had in just over a 100 year period and the amount of them that died too seemed really vast. I didn’t think that such a small island would have so many mentally ill in their asylum. I do understand that in the early 1900s that there was this stigma against people with mental illness and no one really understood it unless they themselves were or had experienced it. Many cases would have been for depression or postnatal depression which is now treatable with medication and counselling. I feel that back then if someone was feeling depressed others didn’t get it at all and thought them as crazy and so they would be referred to the Jersey asylum which is really sad as it is something that needs help and depression isn’t a mental illness that benefits from isolation. I found Tom’s images really great as they show the exact state that the abandoned asylum is in and have really helped me to get a better understanding of what the inside of an asylum would look like, even if it is abandoned, and has given me greater knowledge on how I can construct a good response. I want to try and recreate some of the scenes and rooms in Tom’s photographs and create some sort of narrative and story behind it. This will come from all the research that I have done on the life of local lunatics and how they were treated in the late 1800s before the asylum was originally built.

About | Tom Killick

Tom Killick is an Australian filmmaker/photographer who is currently living in Jersey. Along with two others, Killick has set up his own television and film production company called 3C International where they create advertisements for companies including Sure, Natwest, ITV and Durrell zoo. They are currently working with Durrell zoo and Henry Cavill. The team have also travelled to places including India and been to international fashion events to capture some unique fashion trends and crazes. When I met with Tom he told me about his fascination with being able to photograph places that ordinary people/citizens don’t get access to and so the abandoned Jersey Asylum was the perfect place to go. He was actually asked by the States to make photographs of the entire building while it was still in an alright state as now it is decaying and not stable enough for people to go in there and visit it.

3C International Showreel