“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever,” recites Iqbal, the oldest patient of The Punjab Institute of Mental Health in Lahore, Pakistan. Popularly known as ‘Professor Iqbal’, he is a fan of classical English poetry and occupies one of the 1400 beds in the chronic ward. Living in a space saturated with all kinds of emotions, Iqbal and his fellow patients are usually found amidst songs, dance, tears, tenderness and silences. The songs are of two kinds—either love songs from old Bollywood films or Shia songs of mourning.
Either way, Iqbal and his friends were mostly found singing songs about ‘Ishq’ or unfulfilled love by Marylise Vigneau. With the aim of documenting the life and times of these patients, the Austria-based French photographer kept visiting the hospital for 3 continuous years—”I wish to thank Doctor Nusrat Rana who was the chief psychiatrist of the hospital. The love she inspired to her patients was obvious and the day she left for retirement many were crying. I also wish to thank Aun Raza who is a wonderful photographer and without whom the mood of the place would have been very different and the words lost for ever.” Although, over time, her narrative unconsciously became less about the hospital but more about her tender relationship with the patients. These photographs show the patients at their best and their worst, in wonder and in grief—all lensed by the eyes of Marylise.
Her inspiration for the same goes back to decades earlier, when she was a teenager living in Paris. She explains to Homegrown, “I had seen a post card being sold outside a library. It was featured a photograph by Raymond Depardon taken in the former lunatic asylum of San Clemente in the Venetian Laguna at the end of the seventies. A picture of sheer despair. A headless man wrapping himself in the shelter of his coat. It touched something in me and it remained pinned on the walls of my room for a year or two and in my mind forever. It is how I discovered the power that a photograph can have.”
Monochromatic hues that match Depardon’s composition skills, Marylise has used a very similar technique to document the delicateness of her new friends. Although motionless, the photographs are much more kinetic than observed at a first glance. Vigneau told us that, with these patients, she discovered a newly found importance in motion. “Amongst all the pictures I took through those years of visits, I have chosen the ones where the hands plays a significant role. When reason has deserted, the body language takes over and the choreography of the hands tells the story. It talks about giving, flying, protecting oneself or the other, playing, sheltering oneself or punctuating time and space,” adds Vigneau.
While these photographs shelter the patient’s tenderness, Marylise realised that the old brick walls of the hospital had been hiding her new friends from the callous and merciless world—which honestly made all the difference. While these patients still reside in a culture that treats them as dangerous and unattractive beings, this narrative paints a raw image of these patients, giving them a culture of their own. Vigneau explains, “The stigma against mental illness is rampant in Pakistan. It is sustained by popular belief in spiritual cures—exorcising evil spirits, experimenting with herbal cures and reciting verses from the Quran. Families are often happy to get rid of a troubled relative who has become a burden of shame. In this hospital the patients receive proper care and medicine. It is a world of its own where the emotionally fragile have been discarded but where sometimes I could feel more sanity and sensitivity than outside the hospital.”
Finding beauty within the folds of unexpected relationships and culture, Marylise was certainly gifted with an experience we can only hope to imagine succinctly. The photographer still reminisces the lines she heard along with Iqbal’s poems; “They stopped nude film they should not stop them, they should stop the bombs,” exclaimed one and another reassuringly said, “I have understood the purpose of life: enjoy, enjoy.” Who said what? Well, we leave that for you to decide. Scroll on to see poignant portraits from Marylise’s wonderful series.