BOOK REVIEWS
PHOTO / BRUT’S VAST TROVE OF IMAGES LEAVES OPEN A BIG TROVE OF QUESTIONS Among the varieties of art brut creation, photography has historically received limited attention. A newly extensive, if not definitive, exploration built around the great ABCD art brut collection of Bruno Decharme takes some steps to remedy that situation. Photo / Brut, the exhibit and catalog, boasts impressive scale, and Decharme’s deep art brut experience gives him standing to help define what art brut photography might mean. That’s not exactly what this project seems to be about, however, with the connection to photography a bit loose at times. It encompasses not only actual photographers but also artists like Charles Dellschau and Henry Darger, who incorporated printed images into their work. Even
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THE OUTSIDER
more of a stretch are those who simply used photographs as source material. Together, these kinds of artists constitute about half of Photo / Brut’s roster. As a result, this is less a survey of self-taught photography than a story about how art brut creators respond to and use mechanically reproduced images. As such it can illuminate the relationship between art brut and the surrounding culture, even if it sheds less light on photography per se than one might have hoped. (The curators, of course, have every right to tell the tale that most interests them.) So, if an artist like Adolf Wölfli with his collaged-in printed images is clearly in the art brut canon, where on the
