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Photo Book Reviews

Disfarmer: The Vintage Prints (powerHouse Books) Reviewed by Elissa Bogos Early 20th century photographer Mike Disfarmer captured the portraits of the inhabitants of rural Arkansas, both giving a window into American life and creating classic family albums.  This recent publication from powerHouse Books showcases his enigmatic prints. Article rating: 8.00

Spanning a period of 39 years, this recent publication of the enigmatic Arkansas portrait photographer Mike Disfarmer's work is the most comprehensive collection yet. While previously, Disfarmer's portraits were presented only from posthumous prints made from a cache of glass-plate negatives, this book presents his original vintage prints, obtained by a small dedicated team of individuals who combed the family albums of nearly every resident of Cleburne County, Arkansas.  

Born Mike Meyer in 1884, the man who later changed his surname to Disfarmer is surrounded by a cloud of mystery. He was never married, never dated, had no friends, and kept no journals. Even his tombstone, located in Heber Springs, Arkansas, indicates only the year of his birth and death, leaving the day and month blank. What little is known about him is largely the result of the shadowy and often contradictory recollections of those who once stood before his camera. And while the absence of information about a man almost always leads to intrigue, it is his undeniable talent as a portrait photographer, considered by many to be among the greatest, that has brought about his posthumous fame.  

Disfarmer's professional career began sometime around 1917, when he was involved in a partnership with a man named Primrose. Together, they maintained a portrait studio in the lobby of the Jackson Theater, an elegant building located in the center of Heber Springs. Featured at the beginning of the book, the images uncovered from this early period in Disfarmer's career are quite different from his later work. The Great Depression had not yet occurred, and his subjects seem cheerful, carefree, and judging by their dress, to have enjoyed a fair level of prosperity. The backdrop was a dreamy trompe l'oliel scene, complete with sinewy trees and a castle--a far cry from the two plain ones that Disfarmer would later employ.   

After the end of his partnership with Primrose, (and the subsequent burning of the Jackson Theater in 1921,) Disfarmer set up a studio just off Main Street in Heber Springs.  For the next 15 years or so, (until 1939, when it became "The Disfarmer Studio,")  he ran The Meyer Studio, a "big empty room with damp walls" that also served as his living quarters. Like almost all portrait photographers at that time, Disfarmer made his living by both taking pictures and processing people's film. One of the most unusual facts to emerge about Disfarmer relates to his approach to business. A price list dated 1928 reveals that customers paid four cents a print. Twenty-seven years later, a 1955 receipt indicates that customers were still paying four cents a print. Whether this was because Disfarmer took a rather laid-back approach to sales, or whether his low prices were a necessity in order to compete with mail-order processors like George Eastman's Kodak, is not known, although it might have been a combination of both. At any rate, Disfarmer didn't appear to much care for change in any aspect of his life.  He wore essentially the same outfit every day--a clean white shirt and dark pants--and worked seven days a week. One resident claims he "ate nothing but chocolate ice cream." He continued to use glass-plate negatives until 1952, seven years before he died, even though its successor, celluloid film, had been around for over fifty years. "Such  technology would have been considered eccentrically old-fashioned in 1920, but it may be that he learned to photograph with this antiquated method, liked the results, and never saw a compelling reason to update his equipment." Nevertheless, Disfarmer knew what he was doing. The iridescent quality of so many of his portraits was "no accident," and resulted from an orthochromatic emulsion he coated his negatives with. As it was more receptive to the blue, green and violet portions of the spectrum, it gave the skin a burnished tone, and made "eyes and faces stand out, as though sculpted."

His 1939 name change from Meyer to Disfarmer was founded on his strong will to disassociate himself from the Heber Springs farming community. Meyer, he said, meant "farmer" in German, and the fact that he wasn't a farmer made this name utterly inappropriate.  So strong was his want to further himself from his origins, that he concocted an intricate, bizzarre tale about his being carried off by a tornado as a baby and deposited into the hands of the Meyer family. It was his known eccentricities, however, that were probably responsible for some of his success as a photographer, and certainly "the ritual of having your portrait made by Disfarmer, the crazy man who claimed he grew up in a potato hole, did not lose its charm for many years." Bessie Utley, Disfarmer's assistant during the '40's, remembers Saturdays as being tremendously busy: "I don't care if they had their picture made last week they wanted it again this week....It just went on and on like that." Thus although not a particularly high-grossing business, the Meyer Studio was certainly high-volume. 

And yet residents must have recognized something of his talent, for several of them returned to him through the years to have their family events and rites of passage commemorated by him. "When people lived in one place for many years, the relationships between photographers and subjects were often stable and long-term as well. The same person you had posed as a baby on her mothers lap might, if you became a trusted friend, ask for an Easter Sunday or a baptism or a graduation picture and maybe, eventually, for portraits of the wedding party." Since Disfarmer is remembered by almost all his patrons as taciturn, unfriendly, and lacking "even basic social skills," it must be assumed that many of his returning customers simply liked the photographs he created. A cursory glance at his portraits would make it seem difficult to recognize Disfarmer's own, unique vision. Unlike photographers who choose their subjects, and in so doing reveal an aspect of themselves as well,  Disfarmer's subjects chose him. And being set in a studio, the backdrop varies only between a dark monochromatic one and a lighter-colored one "with a few incongruous dark tape-stripes, like a Mondrian painting." But Disfarmer's hand and eye played a major role in every photograph he took. Utley recalls him "barking out instructions," indicating precisely where to stand and what to look at. His portraits of groups of people make it unmistakably clear that he put a good deal of work into "placing figures and limbs." Most exemplary of this is a portrait of five family members arranged "in such perfect rhythm...The man second from the right has the left side of his vest open. How could Disfarmer, focusing the quintet for minutes in his ground glass, not see this 'mistake'? More likely, he decided to weave the sliver of white lining into the checkered pattern made by the collars, shirts, pants, dresses, and the darker outer side of the vest." 

The startled expression worn by many of his subjects was apparently no mistake either. Kenneth Foust, a once frequent patron of Disfarmer's, recalls entering the studio and being hit by "a 'blast' of light or a big reflector that he held in his hand, not sure. I think it flashed, it caught you off guard." Tom Olmstead, who had his portrait taken both as a boy and a young man, remembers not being given any indication as to when Disfarmer was going to take the picture, "no 'cheese' or anything." More likely than not, this was a conscious decision on Disfarmer's part to try to "increase the chances of an uncanned expression or posture," and it is this that lends Disfarmer's portraits their honest, revelatory quality.  

A bachelor in a city of families, a self-proclaimed agnostic in a community of church-going Baptists and Methodists, and a man who went so far as to change his name to formally sever ties with farming in a place where "everybody raised corn...and most grew sorghum to make molasses," Disfarmer seems to have carved his identity around disassociation. And while "in a town of 3,800 people, he seemed eager to get to know none of them," he still chose to spend seven days a week in the presence of strangers. He was known to spend considerable time tinkering with the light for a portrait, but towards the end of his life the amount of time he spent perfecting his portraits might merely have been a way to avoid going home to his little room a few feet away from his camera. He wasn't a romantic, nor sentimental, and seems to have motivated simply by the desire to capture humanity in its most honest and unaffected form. His range of subject matter, although limited to one small town,  serves to represent America at one of her most crucial points in history, when the Great Depression gave way to World War II. These faces, presumably anonymous to almost anyone who wasn't raised in Heber Springs, Arkansas, intrigue us as does their photographer, which both will undoubtedly continue to do for years and years to come. 

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Great photographs indeed .I was going to buy a few books on this photographer until the truth came out.Too bad the wrong people got involved Posted by: ed fisk Nov 2, 2006 @ 10:53 AM EST

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