Strange Butterflies

Create and Be Recognized: Photography on the Edge , by John Turner and Deborah Klochko (2004). The title scrawled by the outsider artist Howard Finster (1916—2001) on one of his loopy, out-of-focus Polaroids—"Strange Butterfly (Black Cross)"—suggests the hallucinatory beauty displayed here.

(Finster's surreal snap is of a moth, almost camouflaged on a tree trunk, its wings marked with a tiny, scary, upside-down crucifix.) The editors have assembled the work of seventeen "largely self-taught" photographers, from the schizophrenic Adolf Wölfli (1864-1930) to the Humbert Humbert—like Morton Bartlett (1909-1992), who obsessively photographed little plaster girl figurines, all homemade, in glamorous nymphet poses. Most disturbing, though, is a set of demented self-portraits, taken in a Greyhound-station photo booth, by Lee Godie (1908-1994), homeless Chicago madwoman, self-proclaimed "French Impressionist," and—alone in her curtained cubicle—hilarious, vamping imitator of spoiled society matrons. ...