ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the American artist Henry Darger's use of mass-media imagery including photographs of exotic landscapes, animals, and plants culled from popular magazines to make the cover of a monumental, handmade album that interrogates norms of the American family. The Chicago-based, self-taught artist, once an orphan, had been institutionalized as an adolescent in a home for the “feeble-minded” under Progressive-era, eugenics-informed policies meant to halt the breeding of supposed degenerates. After escaping from the institution, he spent the rest of his life privately reworking found photographic imagery and mass-media print clippings into large canvases that he bound together in oversized albums reaching ten feet in length. These works illustrate his epic fictional account of gender non-conforming child fugitives who flee from an evil society that oppresses them. This essay explores his reworking of found photography and clippings as a way of approximating family photography and travel albums for an individual with no family or economic ability to travel. It argues that Darger used the album format to absorb and adapt dominant mass-cultural imagery and its norms into albums that provided momentary flights from the daily realities of his extreme social marginalization.
