'Disfarmer: The Vintage Prints' showcases original works that capture a faded era

Reviewed by Robert L. Pincus
May 28, 2006

Mike Disfarmer is an accidental artist with an alluring life story. For decades, until his death in 1959, he ran a portrait studio in the tiny Arkansas town of Heber Springs. He was an avowed agnostic in a highly religious community. He also changed his name from Meyer to Disfarmer in 1939, to distance himself from his German and agrarian roots. At times, he claimed to have been born to a different family.

BOOK REVIEW Disfarmer: The Vintage Prints Edwynn Houk, Gerd Sander, Richard B. Woodward and Michael P. Mattis; Powerhouse Books/Edwynn Houk Gallery, 240 pages, $60

If not for a wise resident of Heber Springs, Joseph Albright, who bought the contents of Disfarmer's studio from a local bank for five dollars in 1961, the photographer would probably have been lost to the history of photography and art. Eventually, Disfarmer's glass plate negatives came to the attention of Julia Scully, then editor of Modern Photography magazine. She published a book and was the catalyst for their exhibition at the International Center of Photography in New York in 1976.

Once discovered, these portraits became and have remained renowned. It's not hard to see why. Disfarmer, self-taught, had a gift for capturing just the right pose and the right expression that seemed to reveal the essence of someone's character, whether child or adult, pictured singly or in groups. The photographs also create an uncanny parallel to what the great portrait photographer August Sander was doing in Germany, and were an acknowledged influence on Richard Avedon's project “In the American West.”

Yet until the publication of “Disfarmer: The Vintage Prints,” the photographer has been known mostly from modern prints made from the glass plate negatives. The prolific, well-known collector Michael P. Mattis funded a research project to seek vintage prints, mostly achieved by having people knock on doors in Cleburne County, Ark. – and this book is the result. Mattis provides an informative afterword and Gerd Sander, grandson of August Sander as well as a collector and curator, contributes a poignant comparative introduction about the two early 20th-century photographers.

Though not as lustrous as the modern prints, these vintage pictures greatly expand the quantity and time line of Disfarmer's photographs. They give us a visual record of a faded era. As critic Richard Woodward writes in the book's highly readable main essay, small-town photographers were plentiful in Disfarmer's day and most are forgotten – except, perhaps, in their own town.

Why isn't Disfarmer? The answer lies in these frank, affecting portraits – from the picture of a slight girl with worn shoes to the depiction of two elderly men and one woman whose faces seem to convey a hundred stories. There are more than 150 portraits, and most have the elusive quality that raises them above the level of historical document and makes them into art.

Some of what is driving this excavation of Disfarmer's photographs is the rising prices for his work. New York's Edwynn Houk Gallery presented an exhibition to coincide with its publication, and still more vintage prints appeared at a second Manhattan space, the Steven Kasher Gallery. But the new marketing of Disfarmer doesn't detract from the worth of “Disfarmer: The Vintage Prints.” This book dramatically enriches our portrait of a photographer who deserves his posthumous fame.

 Robert L. Pincus, the art critic of the San Diego Union-Tribune, writes frequently about photography.

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