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Disfarmer: The Vintage Prints. By Mike Disfarmer, with text by Edwynn Houk, Gerd Sander, Richard B. Woodward, and Michael P. Mattis. (New York: powerHouse Books, 2005. Pp. 234. Foreword, introduction, 157 duotone photographs, notes. $60.00.)
Mike Disfarmer lived and worked in isolation and obscurity. If he seemed a strange figure to others, he mythologized himself as yet more bizarre. In 1939-somewhere in his fifties-he went to the trouble of a legal name change, abandoning Meyer for a chosen surname that was itself a gesture of rejection. A fabulous self-elaborated narrative deprived his parents of kinship-a tornado, he said, brought the child who would become Disfarmer to their Indiana home. All this private self-invention was of no wide interest, though the name change made the local papers under "Truth is Stranger Than Fiction" heads (p. 207). The demented among us are many, their incoherent mutterings and flailing gestures earning our most assiduous avoidance. When Disfarmer died in 1959, his body went undiscovered for days.
But then, in 1976, everything changed. Disfarmer had been a photographer, earning his living making "penny portraits" for the people of Heber Springs, Arkansas. Some four thousand glass-plate negatives survived him. The stars of his transformation were three: in 1961, Joe All-bright purchased the contents of Disfarmer's studio (he paid five dollars); in 1973, he sold the negatives to Peter Miller (for one dollar), who cleaned them (saving three-fourths and eventually donating them to the Arkansas Arts Center), made modern prints, and sent some to Julia Scully at Modern Photography magazine; in 1976, Scully published Disfarmer: The Heber Springs Portraits, 1939-1946. The book was greeted with extravagant acclaim, and the portraits from Disfarmer's negatives were hailed as "among the best ever taken by any photographer" (p. 224). The crazy guy, it turned out, spawn of a tornado and not a farmer, was a very great photographic artist.
Other articles and books followed (including a short but well-executed video documentary, also...