Anatomical art generally generally depicts recognizable, perfectly formed parts or figures, flayed open to display all the beauty and genius of our design. It’s medical, certainly, but it’s usually a testament to the beauty of the human body. Photographer Adam Voorhes goes in an entirely different direction in the book Malformed: Forgotten Brains of the Texas State Mental Hospital. How he came across his evocative subjects is a surreal story. From the book’s description:

Hidden away out of sight in a forgotten storage closet deep within the bowels of the University of Texas State Mental Hospital languished a forgotten, but unique and exceptional, collection of hundreds of extremely rare, malformed, or damaged human brains preserved in jars of formaldehyde.

Decades later, in 2013, photographer Adam Voorhes discovered the brains and became obsessed with documenting them in close-up, high-resolution, large format photographs, revealing their oddities, textures, and otherworldly essence. Voorhes donned a respirator and chemical gloves, and began the painstaking process of photographing the collection.

Not only had decades worth of rare brains just been tossed aside, Voorhes learned that their abandonment followed a “Battle for the Brains,” where even Harvard attempted to get ahold of the collection. By the time Voorhes began photographing them, half were missing, and many of the remaining specimens suffered from neglect. Working with a journalist, he set out to find the rest of the brains, even renewing interest in the collection—The University of Texas is doing MRI scans on them now.

Sadly, many of the brains were likely disposed of after a lack of resources and care left them to fallow (and bureaucracy failed to record it). It was reported just yesterday that 100 of the brains were thrown out in 2002, as they had deteriorated beyond medical usage—one was rumored to be the brain of Charles Whitman, the ex-Marine who went on a shooting spree from the University of Texas at Austin clock tower that killed 16 people in 1966. Many brains remain missing, and people are still trying to track them down.
 

 

 

 

 
More after the jump…