Review: Chance played a huge role in bringing Disfarmer's work to light
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 09 12, 2012
Author Julia Scully has written a fascinating account of how an obscure small-town portrait photographer's work came to light after many years of sitting in boxes in an exposed carport. The town was Heber Springs, Arkansas, and the photographer was Mike Disfarmer (although he had changed his birth name of Meyer). For 50, a family got three postcard-sized prints from Disfarmer, a recluse who lived in quarters behind his studio and seldom mixed socially. Fifty cents was a lot of money to dirt farmers who were so poor that "when the Depression came, they hardly noticed."Through pure chance, his portraits eventually came to light years after his death in 1959. The author traces the path from the discovery of Disfarmer's negatives through their publication and exhibition. Today, exhibition-quality prints fetch prices upwards of $25,000.It makes you wonder how many more boxes of glass and film negatives are collecting dust in attics and basements around the country, and even worse, how many have been destroyed, with the loss of so many memories. At least the remarkable work of Mike Disfarmer has been preserved and his story documented. The Kindle Single includes four of Disfarmer's photos as a sampling of his work. I found other photos online.The story was reminiscent of another top-notch Kindle Single, "The Story of a Photograph: Walker Evans, Ellie Mae Burroughs, and the Great Depression."