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Is there any existence more abject than that of the hardcore fan? They slavishly devote their lives to fretting over the biographical minutiae of strangers, as if driven by an insatiable lack that renders them unable to 'get a life', to find a foothold in their own everyday existence. There is something vaguely unwholesome, and slightly scary, about their obsessiveness, and we tend to read it as a sign of mental unbalance. Yet, in reality, the only alarming thing about most die-hard fans is how they reveal the ways in which our desires can race on a treadmill of misrecognition, endlessly spinning in a one-way world of their own making.

Perusing the 500 snapshots in Starstruck: Photographs from a Fan (1999) by Gary Lee Boas, abjection definitely springs to mind. An amateur paparazzo who grew up in a small Pennsylvania town, Boas took some 50,000 celebrity portraits over the course of four decades, chronicling his fascination with a far-flung galaxy of stars ranging from Greta Garbo to porn icon Marilyn Chambers, from Elton John to Muhammad Ali. His photos are frequently out of focus, haphazardly composed, and their once-bright colours have faded to duller hues. In other words, they evoke almost absolute incompetence. But as social documents they comprise a brief history of celebrity while testifying to the curious powers of fan photography.

The images in Starstruck span the period from 1966 to 1980, the year Mark David Chapman assassinated John Lennon and gave fandom a bad name. Boas' photos, by contrast, document what seems like a more innocent time when stars, undaunted by the spectre of homicidal stalkers, were relatively accessible. In contrast to the aggressive demeanour of professional paparazzi, Boas - who never stalked his subjects, but patiently waited outside TV studios and backstage doors - seems as innocent as a bird-watcher, his undertaking motivated not by profit but by personal passion.

It would be a mistake, though, to assume that his amateur status or the artlessness of his pictures is a guarantee of authenticity - that because they capture the famous in awkward poses and without the flattering illumination of the studio, the snapshots are somehow more 'real' or revealing than the slick and seamlessly packaged portraits we find in magazines. In their own way, Boas' blurry, off-kilter images are just as surreal as any retouched headshot. For one thing, their low-fi, home-made appearance enhances, rather than deflates, our illusory intimacy with the celebrities they depict, so that looking at Starstruck inevitably feels a bit like glancing through a scrapbook filled with faces of former friends. For another, Boas' pictures display a deadpan, Warholian equivalence in the way they portray their subjects: his camera is essentially a type of grinding machine, reducing everyone it records to an unreal sameness.

In this respect, his photographs call to mind low-budget pornography. (Boas, coincidentally, spent ten years working in an adult bookstore in his hometown, and his book mingles several portraits of porn stars amid shots of mainstream entertainers). Revealing next to nothing about the psychology of the individuals they depict, Boas' pictures instead concentrate on the mechanics of their public intercourse. Instead of pretending to get underneath the star's social mask, these pictures do something far more concrete: they lay bare the choreographed gestures with which the famous greet their adoring (and intrusive) fans.

Just as porn movies, with their transparently shoddy production values, lame acting, and inane dialogue and sound effects, can inadvertently create a Brechtian-style estrangement, Boas' pictures distance us from fame's halo of glamour. Yet, at the same time, they strike an oddly fictional note. Partly this is due to the essentially theatrical nature of the celebrities' public poses - whether flashing well-rehearsed smiles, glaring at the camera or covering their faces with their hands, their behaviour seems scripted rather than spontaneous. As a result, these repetitive pictures seem to cast doubt on the camera's ability to capture reality. Not unlike pornography or the amateur photos of biker chicks that Richard Prince is so fond of, Boas' photos seem to exist in their own hermetic parallel universe.

Obsessives, of course, are by nature cosmographers. Fans paper the walls of their rooms with their chosen icons, as if mapping out the boundaries of their particular cosmos (and blotting out the one the rest of us live in). Not pictures in a conventional sense, their photos function more as objects and markers. For someone like Boas, the documentary aspect of photography is clearly secondary to its fetishistic value: his pictures essentially function as trophies, providing evidence of his first person encounters with those unreal and forever faraway beings we call 'stars'.

Boas, however, maintains that as a teenager he began using his camera mainly in order to 'connect' with the famous. In several anecdotes included in Starstruck, he describes his celebrity relationships - how he 'connected' with Julie Christie at a 1972 Democratic rally, and how, after 'connecting' with Richard M. Nixon on numerous occasions, he was eventually invited to the former President's funeral, to sit amongst an audience, as he ecstatically notes, that included five living US Presidents and four Secretaries of State. 'To sit at the funeral as a guest was just a situation that was unbelievable to me, like frozen time,' he writes.

He could be describing his own photographs. For all their amateurish banality, they are curiously elusive, at once utterly matter-of-fact and quietly fantastical. But then every fan's devotional enterprise is based on a fantastical premise: the otherworldliness of the star, and our corollary desire to touch the untouchable, to become intimate with the inaccessible. The fan only wants to connect with a fantasy - the fantasy of fame - which, precisely because it is a dream, is a hundred times more powerful than the pull of flesh and blood.

In the end, for all his stated desire to make personal contact with the famous, Boas' pictures don't draw us closer to specific celebrities, but to the obsessiveness and unreality that underlies the entire photographic enterprise. Long ago, Walter Benjamin observed that the great appeal of photographs was not simply that they could depict the world, but that they responded to a perverse need to bring all things within our grasp, to have the world at our fingertips. But the fan's incantory compulsion to photographically record his objects of veneration is also about keeping physical existence at a distance, by constantly displacing it into the realm of reproduction. This endeavour is potentially an endless one, and perhaps also a quest for endlessness, inasmuch as the celebrity horizon is virtually limitless. Maybe that's why Boas' shabby snapshots of glamorous people end up seeming not just pathetic, but weirdly sublime.