Disfarmer

 A friend mentioned to me that he had recently become aware of a  photographer named Michael Disfarmer.  I had never heard of this photographer and, therefore, was pleased when my friend lent me a book (obtained through the library) about this figure.  I've now studied this volume of photographs by Disfarmer -- although the book is simply entitled Disfarmer on its spine, the volume is captioned "1926 - 1949 The Heber Springs Photographs."  As this subtitle informs us, the pictures were taken in a photography studio in a small town in rural Arkansas by the village's commercial photographer,  Disfarmer seems to have specialized in portraits; he works in an archaic style, apparently producing the pictures on small (playing card size) glass-plate negatives.  Unknown to the larger world during his lifetime, Disfarmer's work was discovered by a former professional photographer who had been employed by a newspaper in Little Rock. The photographer contacted the editors of a journal, Modern Photography, and the pictures, thought to have considerable aesthetic merit, have been published in several selections of Disfarmer's work, including the rather lavish volume that my friend had obtained through the local library system.  In all a total of 4200 glass negative exists, although some number of them are no longer legible due to age and decay.  Disfarmer was discovered as an important, if highly idiosyncratic, talent long after his death in 1959 and accounts as to his character vary -- some regarded him as eccentric and possibly predatory; others thought he was harmless.  Clearly, he was one of "pure products of America" to use the phrase from William Carlos Williams great poem "For Elisa" -- an "isolate", a "virtual hermit" as he is called in the book who seems to have unnerved people who knew him.  Although he was part of a large family living near Heber Springs, Disfarmer disavowed them, claimed that he was raised amidst these people because dropped among them as an infant by a wandering tornado, and, after a few decades, came to be regarded as a man completely apart from others, a strange and unsettling loner who make taking portraits an exercise in silence and intimidation, an ordeal that is figured on the faces of his subjects.  Almost no one smiles; everyone scowls at the camera (and by extension Disfarmer), people stand stiffly in a black void or posed against a white backdrop marked with one or two strips of black tape, a bit like a much more abbreviated version of the black and white grid on which Muybridge posed the naked victims of his photography.  

By the standards of Hollywood or TV advertising, most people are very ugly.  Usually, professional photographers labor to make their subjects look handsome, suave, caricatures, as it were, of TV and movie models.  Disfarmer shows no charitable (or dishonest) impulses in this direction.  His portraits are stark and unflattering, shot in clinical light in which the people are shown like medical specimens.  Some of the figures are attractive in a haunted and spectral sort of way -- many of the people are grotesquely ugly, although as with many unsightly visages, these faces have a haggard and gaunt integrity and, in fact, they grow on  you -- indeed, you feel a faint affection or, at least, sympathy for many of these people.  The great riddle posed by photography is the extent to which the viewer imputes meaning to the picture.  We have no idea what any of these people were like -- therefore, when we conclude that someone is suffering or stoic or, for that matter, stupid or intelligent, we are imposing those values on the portrait.  In fact, the pictures are noteworthy because they seem to be made completely without any judgement on the figures portrayed.  Disfarmer seems to have stripped his own personality from the work -- it is classically still, poised, and indifferent, a God's eye view of the denizens of Heber Springs.  

In the volume of photographs that I perused, about half of the pictures show a single figure posed against a black background (probably about 20% of the pictures use the weird white set with the vertical strips of black tape.)  The rest of the pictures show family groups, brothers and brother-in-laws, sisters and best friends, mothers with their homely miserable-looking babies.  No one is overweight.  Everyone seems on the verge of starvation and some of the faces display the anguish that we see in pictures of dirt farmers taken during the Depression by WPA photographers.  One woman is posed in profile, dressed in a jaunty outfit but she seems to be so skinny as to be skeletal.  Some of the men look like rough characters that you wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley -- they glare at the camera in a way that reminds me of Civil War pictures of soldiers or images of gunmen taken in the Old West.  The men have dead eyes and their hands hang down like inert sledge hammers at their sides.  (Probably, these were all hale fellows well-met -- happy-go-luck "good ole boys", but this isn't how Disfarmer photographs them.)  Because most of the people are so slender, their store-bought clothes hang loose on them.  Many of the pictures affect us on the basis of contrast:  a normal-looking brother poses next to a much smaller sibling who has vaguely Asian features and seems deeply distressed; three men pose in a jocular way -- two eerie scarecrows flanking a jovial man who looks like he stepped out of a TV sitcom.  In the group pictures, family resemblance take on the appearance of congenital deformities.  If these people are dressed up in their Sunday Best they must be very poor indeed.  Two pictures will suffice to give a sense for the images in this book.  A little girl who seems to be about three years old sits with a round-faced dour baby dressed in white and wearing a white sailor's cap.  The toddler has disheveled short hair that no one has bothered to comb.  The baby sits between her legs and her right foot is sprawled to the infant's side, a slab of shoe sole that is strangely disturbing and uncommunicative.  It's an ungainly posture that either Disfarmer intentionally created or accidentally shot -- who knows?  The toddlers feet seem too large and inert.  The picture is disturbing because the little girl is clutching the baby for dear life -- it's as if the two children are being threatened with something awful; there's an aspect of uncanny abduction haunting the picture, as if someone is about to snatch the little kids, hurl them into a tornado, and have them deposited among some strange family that is not their own.  The children sit on a black bench, a completely austere piece of furniture to raise them off the floor -- we see this sepulchral black object is several other pictures, including a shot of a four-year old boy (by my estimate) decked out in an elaborate shaggy-looking cowboy suit.  Another picture shows a girl standing on a concrete floor (Disfarmer's studio has a concrete slab floor that looks like what you would find in a garage).  The girl faces the camera full-frontal and she is wearing a white smock that looks a bit like Disfarmer's white backdrop with the black tape --there are some faint wrinkles in the garment and it has two bows one on her shoulder and the other below at her hip on the opposite side of the garment.  (The garment is marmoreal and has a classical lucidity -- it seems like a theorem by Euclid, a bit of pure geometry.)  The girl is pretty with very neatly coiffed hair and she has either a faint smile or a vague look of uncertainty -- it seems that she's experimenting with an expression in the hope that it will please someone; but she can't get beyond looking very tentative.  The picture is disturbing, however, because the little girl's feet are turned sharply to the side -- in other words, the child's knees and shoes don't match the posture of the rest of her body.  I experimented with this pose myself, turning my feet sharply to the side while keeping my torso facing straight ahead -- it's an uncomfortable pose and would be very difficult to sustain.  There is something of the Greek Kore about the picture -- a dead maiden who has appeared against a wholly black void standing on cold concrete that with ruled slabs.  Even the faint archaic smile on the classical Kore is present in this picture.  The image is very beautiful but it has a distinct mortuary aspect.  

The essay that accompanies the pictures compares Disfarmer with Eugene Capa (the war photographer), Diane Arbus, and, of course, August Sander.  The comparisons are mostly inapposite.  Capa took pictures of the D-Day landings among other things and has nothing to do with the insular, ostensibly undramatic pictures that Disfarmer makes.  Arbus was complicit with her freakish subjects -- she doesn't confront them but rather forms an alliance with the people she photographs.  It's hard to imagine Disfarmer forming an alliance with anyone.  Sander, of course, attempted to document every type of human being; he had the encyclopedic ambition of many German artists and his objective was to portray all of society -- we see plump self-satisfied bourgeoisie, confrontational artists, craftsmen, farmers, and, finally, misfits, retarded people and, at last, a homeless man turned slightly to the side, his features blasted by misery, wearing rags against a blurry landscape that seems perpetually enshrouded in rain.  Sander's people are "representative" -- they are usually quite pleased with themselves; his baker, for instance, is a jolly little pug of a man who dares us to make fun of him.  Disfarmer's people don't represent anything but themselves; even when they appear in groups, somehow, they seem to be alone.  The figure in American photography who most resembles Disfarmer is Charles Van Schaick, the small-town photographer whose work is featured in Michael Lesy's haunting Wisconsin Death Trip (1973).  Van Schaick took pictures of people living in Black River Falls, Wisconsin between about 1880 and 1920.  Many of Disfarmer's photographs resemble Van Schaick's work.  Wisconsin Death Trip, once a famous book, though now largely forgotten.  Lesy was a student of sociology and his book was, in fact, submitted as his doctoral thesis.  The book is experimental in character.  Lesy juxtaposes pictures made by Van Schaick with news reports from the several local newspapers.  The reports that Lesy selects all involve madness, murder, and suicide -- people light themselves on fire or die after drinking potato bug poison.  (One man sits down with a bucket of well-water and drinks himself to death using nothing more than pure, cold water.)  Women are raped and commit suicide or die by abortion.  Old widows go mad and run amuck.  Lesy's thesis was that by 1880 small towns in America had become "charnel houses" to use his term -- everyone with good looks or ambition or brains had fled to the big cities. Wisconsin Death Trip has the dank, claustrophobic aspect of a nightmare and the pictures are an illustration of that nightmare -- dead babies, people who seem totally insane, thugs posing under walls covered with stuffed animals (it looks like Norman Bates' parlor in Psycho), gaunt horses with long blonde manes.  All of this stuff is presented with newspaper commentary that is harrowing.  But the book, in the end, I think is a cheat. If you presented these stark photographs with newspaper stories about banquets, christenings, family birthdays, and barn-raisings, I think the pictures would look very different.  There's no cheating in Disfarmer -- the pictures are presented without commentary.  You have to look at them yourself to discover what the image means if it means anything at all.  

(SELCO, the South-Eastern Library network, is loaning out a rare book.  The book that I describe in this essay was printed sumptuously in Japan and released in a First Edition, slip-cased, volume with only 4000 printed.  I presume the book is quite valuable.)