When the photographer and graphic designer Morton Bartlett died in 1992 at the age of 83, his relatives found fifteen chests holding half-life-size dolls and accessories, twelve girls and three boys, together with hand-sewn clothes, black-and-white photographs and archival materials. Bartlett began designing the dolls in the mid-1930s, studying anatomy and costume history while learning to sew and to model clay; each doll took up to a year to complete, and he staged them in lifelike scenarios before photographing them, documenting a family he never had; the work remained unexhibited in his lifetime. This volume, the third instalment of the Hamburger Bahnhof series on outsider artists, accompanies the exhibition secret universe III in Berlin in 2012.