PURCHASE, NY.- For almost forty years, local residents of and visitors to Heber Springs, Arkansas could get their pictures taken for a mere 25 cents (50 cents for three) by one of the commercial photographers in town – Mike Disfarmer – an eccentric, whose postcard-sized portraits, made between 1915 and 1959, vividly and artfully depicted everyday people in rural America. Farmers in overalls, adolescents in prom attire, housewives in flowered dresses and thick hairnets, enlisted men in uniform, all posed for the pictures, which often made their way into family albums or bureau drawers. These “penny portraits” became more than simple photographs, however, as following their first major debut as artworks in 1977, critics believed they unfailingly captured the essence of their subjects and periods of history in which they lived.
The Neuberger Museum of Art of Purchase College, is presenting Becoming Disfarmer, the first museum exhibition in the New York metropolitan region to include examples of Disfarmer’s restored and unrestored vintage prints, made between 1925-1950, enlargements made posthumously from 1976-2005 from his glass plate negatives dated 1939-1946, as well as audio clips, historical journals, newspapers, and other ephemera.
In this exhibition, the original function of the photographs as intimate family keepsakes is acknowledged through an installation featuring the inscribed fronts and backs of several photographs. There also are several unrestored portraits, sometimes valued more for their creases and tears than for their imagery. The exhibition, curated by Chelsea Spengemann, an independent scholar, is a critical examination of Disfarmer’s work as well as the first museum survey to consider the ways in which Disfarmer’s vernacular photographs have been revalued and recast. An illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition with essays by the curator and writers Gil Blank and Tanya Sheehan.
Mike Disfarmer (1884–1959) was a curiosity – an eccentric and an outcast within his community. Born Mike Meyer, grandson of German immigrants, he changed his name in 1939 to disassociate himself with his family and upbringing. The name “Meier” in German once translated to “dairy farmer,” and because he wished to make the point that he was not (dis) a Meyer or a farmer, he took the name Disfarmer. Disfarmer moved with his mother to Heber Springs in 1914 and briefly ran a studio there with another photographer before opening his own business. He lived with his mother until a tornado destroyed their home in 1926. His own studio with living quarters where he worked until his death was built in 1925.
Disfarmer’s approach to photography was straightforward: he would position his subjects against either a plain or striped backdrop and have them stare into the camera, with the result that the focus was directly on the individual. He rarely captured them smiling. His skill was to elicit from these traditional poses consistently compelling images that are considered today to have strongly captured the spirit of a bygone era. Other than in Heber Springs and nearby towns, Disfarmer was largely unknown, until the early 1970s, when an editor at the Arkansas Sun, who had obtained some of Disfarmer’s glass negatives, asked readers if they could identify the subjects printed a weekly column “Someday My Prints Will Come”. In 1977, when expert black and white photography printers were commissioned to translate Disfarmer’s imagery into seductive oversized photographs for an exhibition, Disfarmer’s vernacular imagery was accepted as art. Thus, with the first public appearance of the vintage prints in 2005, a second revaluation of Disfarmer’s portraits occurred, and a market was born.
“Many value a vintage print because they believe it is closer to the way the artist wished it to look and it is a unique object, whereas a posthumous enlargement is typically considered a manipulation,” Ms. Spengemann explains. “In fact, both vintage prints and enlargements of Disfarmer’s work as presented to viewers today, apart from their original context -- photos in a family album, are translations of his vernacular portraits, visually and conceptually.” How Disfarmer’s images appear to us today is a construction of their posthumous presentations, regardless, and that has not yet been acknowledged in relation to his work. “Considering the enlargements as part of Disfarmer’s work is as important as considering the vintage prints,” Ms. Spengemann points out. Therefore, Becoming Disfarmer invites viewers to consider the varied presentations of Disfarmer’s portraits and the meanings that are gained and lost with each.
According to Ms. Spengemann some collectors declined to participate in the exhibition because the majority of the vintage photographs that she selected for the exhibition were neither iconic nor in the finest condition, which those collectors understood to be disparaging toward the legacy of Disfarmer, rather than important to the scholarship being presented about the vernacular history of the portraits. As Tracy Fitzpatrick, Chief Curator of the Neuberger Museum of Art, notes, “Close examination can’t occur in a vacuum. By showing only iconic work, you tell a very narrow story and wind up supporting some of the less positive forces of the art market. Disfarmer’s vintage prints in their current state, worn and handled, say something about their past function, about a community and a place. And showing them in combination with posthumous prints tells another story that is also important. Sometimes the past is made clearer within the context of the present.”
Becoming Disfarmer, then, is about the photographs and their histories, and the photographer and his posthumous reception.
