John F. Turner is a writer and curator who lives in California. Turner has written books on photography and folk art and is an adjunct curator at the San Francisco Craft and Folk Art Museum. He has also worked for NBC news and documented the lives of folk artists for many years.
Turner befriended visionary, self-taught artist and Baptist minister Howard Finster sometime in the late 1970s. The research material in this collection was compiled over a decade for Turner's book Howard Finster: Man of Vision (Alfred A. Knopf, 1989).