Mike Disfarmer: 1930s-1940s portraits

[LadyBaltimore]

Mike Disfarmer, born Mike Meyer (he changed his name to disassociate with his family's agrarian roots) in 1884, had a portrait studio on the back porch of his mother's house in Herber Springs, Arkansas, where he photographed people in the community for modest fees. After a tornado swept through in the 1930s, he opened a portrait studio on main street and became a full time photographer. He was obsessed with having the right lighting and supposedly the lighting adjustments for a portrait could sometimes take an hour. Disfarmer was reclusive and a bit of an oddity. Not much is known about his personal life. His work was never published or received any notoriety until discovered posthumously. Here's some examples of his work, sorry for the variance in size, difficult to find good quality scans of his online...

P.S. Sorry if this is in the wrong place, I wasn't quite sure what section of the forums to post this in...

 

[Fading Fast]

Awesome photographs - clearly a talented person.

 

[TheDon]

Very cool. It's definitely a rural area with all of the overalls. Nice view of regular working class Americans. Thanks for sharing

 

[DecoDame]

I've gotten several books from the library of collections of his work. He was certainly an odd duck, but did manage to amass an amazing piece of history of that particular town's citizens. These folks shown here don't look too hard up, but I remember quite a few where you could tell they were living a pretty hardscrabble life (more from their bodies and faces than clothes). Fascinating, but also hard to look at.

 

[Flat Foot Floey]

Yes. I also have one of his books (2006 by Steidl) and it's an amzing collection of very honest portraits.

 

[dh66]

Cool stuff. I'm going to look for some books. Thanks for posting this Lady B!