Photo/Brut

This groundbreaking volume on photo brut presents the work of 40 artists, revealing a fascinating and boundary-stretching art form that tackles unconventional approaches to photography and gives voice to marginalised and provocative artists from around the world.

Photo brut—a genre of art brut, or outsider art—spans photography, prints, photomontage, collage, and other combinations of media and techniques. This art form allows those living on the fringes of society to share and voice their unique perception of the world, offering unconventional approaches to issues of sexuality, identity, and reality.

These 520 works of photo brut are visceral and intimate; they offer profound insight into the realm of outsider art and present new ways of contemplating and interpreting the world. A section on private affairs addresses questions of sexuality, perversion, the femme fatale icon, the Madonna, and innocence. Artists who attempt, through their work, to reappropriate and tame the world are presented together in a chapter that brings issues of modern society into sharp focus.

A third section, featuring artists whose work is a mode of self-expression, is dedicated to performance, role play, and blurred/fluid/plural identities. The last part covers practices and rituals using pseudo-scientific or magical explanations to confront apparitions and terrifying truths, to understand mysterious forces, and to create order.

This authoritative first book dedicated to the previously unpublished field offers a rich and exciting corpus; it is an important contribution to the history of art.

Exhibition schedule for 2020‒2021:

• Art Brut in the World: 500 works: Powerstation of Art, Shanghai, China, 3 July‒end September 2020
• 3331 Arts Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan, 17 July‒end September 2020
• Museum Lentos, Linz, Austria, December 2020‒March 2021
• Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland, April‒July 2021