CHILD PROTECTOR or PEDOPHILIC MURDERER? Henry Darger, Artist. All Saints Cemetery, Des Plaines, ILL.

Invested in new camera equipment; including a gimbal camera stabilizer with an extended arm, which is nice because I can now more easily get really up-close to the gravestone pictures and etchings while avoiding stepping on a person’s burial location. Still a little shaky on this video, was still learning how to use it.

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ON HENRY DARGER:

Henry Joseph Darger Jr. was an American writer and artist who worked as a hospital custodian in Chicago, Illinois. He has become famous for his posthumously discovered fantasy manuscript called "The Story of the Vivian Girls", in what Is known as the "Realms of the Unreal", along with several hundred drawings and watercolor paintings illustrating the story.

Our related video on Eliska Paroubek, the little girl who Henry Darger possibly kidnapped and murdered, at her resting place at Bohemian National Cemetery in Chicago, Illinois:
https://youtu.be/AVpyg5S97GI

The visual subject matter of his work ranges from idyllic scenes in Edwardian interiors and tranquil flowered landscapes populated by children and fantastic creatures, to scenes of horrific terror and carnage depicting young children being tortured and massacred. Darger's artwork has become one of the most celebrated examples of outsider art.
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After being committed and released from the Lincoln asylum, Darger repeatedly attempted to adopt a child, but his efforts failed. Images of children often served as his inspiration, particularly a portrait from the Chicago Daily News from May 9, 1911: a five-year-old murder victim, named Elsie Paroubek. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsie_Paroubek).
Elsie had left home on April 8th of that year telling her mother she was going to visit her aunt around the corner from her home. She was last seen listening to an organ grinder with her cousins. Her body was found a month later in a sanitary district channel near the screen guards of the powerhouse at Lockport.

This newspaper photo was part of a growing personal archive of clippings Darger had been gathering. There is no indication that the murder or the news photo and article had any particular significance for Darger, until one day he could not find it. Writing in his journal at the time, he began to process this forfeiture of yet another child, lamenting that "the huge disaster and calamity" of his loss "will never be atoned for", but "shall be avenged to the uttermost limit". According to his autobiography, Darger believed the photo was among several items that were stolen when his locker at work was broken into. He never found his copy of the photograph again. Because he could not remember the exact date of its publication, he could not locate it in the newspaper archive. He carried out an elaborate series of novenas and other prayers for the picture to be returned. The fictive war that was sparked by Darger's loss of the newspaper photograph of Paroubek, whose killer was never found, became Darger's magnum opus. He had been working on some version of the novel before this time (he makes reference to an early draft which was also lost or stolen), but now it became an all-consuming creation.

In "The Realms of the Unreal", Paroubek is imagined as Annie Aronburg, the leader of the first child slave rebellion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Darger
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FROM the article "Portraits of a Serial Killer?" by Sean Thomas, published on January 12, 2005 in The Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2005/jan/12/art

He was eventually consigned, at 12, to the Lincoln County Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children. The diagnosis was "masturbation".

The teenage Darger, by then an orphan, made several attempts to escape his appalling imprisonment, succeeding at 16. Thereafter he rented a minuscule room on Chicago's North Side, living in similar circumstances until his retirement at 71.

The most significant external event in this narrow adult life occurred when Darger was nearly 20. A Chicago girl called Elsie Paroubek was abducted and strangled. The murder has never been solved; a few claim Darger was the culprit. Darger certainly cherished a newspaper photograph of the girl, and built a shrine to her memory when he lost the photo.

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Видео CHILD PROTECTOR or PEDOPHILIC MURDERER? Henry Darger, Artist. All Saints Cemetery, Des Plaines, ILL. канала Faces of the Forgotten