These photos are of a now-lost place - a realm of dreams.
All photos copyright Keizo Kitajima
These beautiful photos of the apartment at 851 Webster were taken 25 years after Mr. Darger's death, before the room was, at last, dismantled.
The collection of Oz books feels so familiar, because there are so many similar little volumes littering my own shelves.
But this is the photo that makes me feel like I might start crying - every single time I see it:
The boxes of pencil nubs and crayons and cracked watercolor cakes. Irrefutable proof that the most humble of materials can create exquisite things.
These photos are just a smidgen of the two visual records contained in this book. One set of photographs is in black and white, taken after the initial discovery of the strange and wondrous room. The second is a color series, taken in 1999, before the bits and pieces of the room found their way to the Intuit Museum in Chicago.
Some excellent friends presented me with this book last Christmas...they had squirrelled it away for me on their own trip to The Room, as it exists now.
It's really a treasure, and I get lost whenever I look through it. The sheer amount of things in that room: the pencils, paintings, clippings, balls of twine, thick stacks of paper wavy from time and paste.
It was somebody's whole world in there.