Society can be judged as much by what it abandons as by what it builds.

If one hears ghostlike murmurs while looking through Christopher Payne‘s photographs in “Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals,” it may be because the people who once occupied these imposing and forbidding places are still among us. But they no longer dwell within the fortresses — or were they sanctuaries? — into which Mr. Payne now guides the reader.

“One must not be too romantic about madness, or the madhouses in which the insane were confined,” the neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote in his introduction to Mr. Payne’s book, published in September by the M.I.T. Press. He added, however, that Mr. Payne’s pictures “evoke for me not only the tumultuous life of such places, but the protected and special atmosphere they offered.”

Mr. Payne, 41, lives in Brooklyn. He is both an architect and a photographer. His romance with America’s jettisoned architectural patrimony was evident in “New York’s Forgotten Substations: The Power Behind the Subway,” published by the Princeton Architectural Press in 2002.

That year, he began what would become a six-year, 30-state tour of more than 70 hospitals, many of them still functioning, though at a fraction of their capacity.

He was surprised to find little resistance to his project from the administrators and workers at the hospitals, who were instead proud of their institutions’ history and eager to see it documented. His affection — for surely it is affection that permits Mr. Payne to photograph architecture so intimately — must have impressed them. They literally opened doors for him.

Mr. Payne shared a few examples with Lens. For instance, he described the abandoned autopsy theater at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington (Slide 1):

St. Elizabeth’s is still in operation, therefore requiring an escort at all times. As we toured these spaces and grounds, the guard realized I wasn’t finding anything that interested me. He stopped, scratched his chin and said with a slight smile, “I think I know what you’ll like.” He unlocked a door and I stood frozen, gazing on the autopsy theater. Everything remained intact, with log books and autopsy jars neatly arranged in rows on shelves. The lights and morgue freezer still worked.

Another abandoned space within a functioning institution was to be found at the Kankakee State Hospital in Illinois (Slide 3), one of many structures laid out along the lines prescribed in the 19th century by Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride. These were typically a long series of linked pavilions, arranged symmetrically in a shallow V, at the juncture of which was the administrative building.

As hospitals downsized, it was not uncommon to abandon the outer wards on the top floors, while still occupying the lower floors. Such is the case with Kankakee, one of the few “Kirkbrides” still in use as a psychiatric facility. I made a special trip just to see this place, a long drive from New York to Illinois, and didn’t know what to expect. On the phone, the director said no one had been up to the top floors for years, but added that the wards were “unrenovated” and typical of what the older ones once looked like. The gamble paid off. This ward is unique for its vaulted ceiling and unusually wide, solid wooden doors to the patient bedrooms.

What distinguishes Mr. Payne’s work is not only his knowing documentation of architectural features but his eye for the telling human detail. He found one such moment at the Hudson River State Hospital in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. (Slide 2).