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He brought it out in people. He brought the rawness out.
It really showed the feelings of the people
that had endured a lot of pain during the depression era
and during war time.
Up until somebody from New York was interested in the pictures,
they had no value.
They just had the sentimental that they've had for 50 years.
They're not even pictures anymore. They're money.
They changed from pictures of my grandmother to money.
I guess some people could look at it as a commodity.
But none of that would have happened
if it hadn't had that soul to start with.
People recognize the greatness of the human spirit
and Disfarmer got that.
And I think that's the power of the photographs.
I'd say he was 5'9"
and probably 175 lbs.
Scraggly, funny hat, dirty, little dirty.
I wouldn't touch him.
But he always was slick shaved. I reckon he shaved every day.
I never did see him with a beard on his face.
I've heard that he was unusual, you know.
I heard he drank. He drank and smoked.
As children, we were afraid of him.
He looked that bad. He was scary.
He wore a big old heavy, heavy, heavy wool overcoat.
He was a man of few words, you know.
He was an infidel. He didn't go to church.
Nobody knew anything about him, very little about him.
He only told what he wanted to tell.
He just didn't bother with a lot of talk.
If he knew you real well, he'd open up more.
But if he didn't know you,
he just said what he needed to say and that was it.
Basically, he was a loner.
If he didn't know you,
or something you said, he didn't like,
he'd cut you off short, you know.
He'd tell you, "You go to hell."
I remember him pretty well during that time.
I just remember him being a weirdo.
I'm a lawyer now How Peter Miller discovered Mike Disfarmer
but before I was a lawyer,
I was a photographer.
My wife and I lived in New York
and I was wanting to be a photographer.
We had some friends in Arkansas and she and I came to Arkansas
and decided to sort of look around.
We were unhappy living in New York.
So, there I am in Heber Springs, quintessential New Yorker,
Jewish to boot, sort of this sort of outsider
working at a newspaper called The Arkansas Sun
And as a way of promoting it, we had this contest.
And the contest was, "Someday My Prints Will Come."
And the idea was, if you give us a photograph
of yourself or your kin, we will print it.
Well, suddenly, some of the old photographs started showing up.
I looked at them. I loved them.
I found out whose they were and I went to Joe Albright.
Joe Albright is the fellow
that had salvaged
the Disfarmer plates.
Mike Disfarmer was dead and had been a couple of years
and they were going to bulldoze
that studio.
And Joe Albright, a realtor here, bought--
for five bucks, from the bank-- the contents of the old studio.
So, we went down and there were these boxes
of mouldering negatives.
I felt like it was something
that should be saved and preserved.
It wasn't until then that any of us
had the remotest idea that Mike Meyer--
Mike Disfarmer,
alias Mike Meyer--
had any particular talent at all.
Most of his subjects were people who came in from the country,
on the weekend, and for more or less entertainment,
went down and got their picture made for a quarter.
It was entertainment for them, pure and simple.
Saturday was the big day to come to town.
The streets in Heber Springs Charlotte Lacey
were full of people.
And they just kind of walked from one end of Main Street
up and go down the other, visiting with people.
And of course, if you came to town on Saturday,
why you had to go to Disfarmer to get your picture made.
Having your picture taken
was this event, you know,
in their Sunday best and, you know,
they came from out of town
specifically to have their picture taken.
It was a great thrill to go to
Mike Meyers Disfarmer's studio
and have your picture made. That was really something.
We didn't have much.
It was a big deal to spend a quarter to get a picture made.
It might have taken an hour
to make that quarter.
You picked strawberries maybe,
for 2¢ a quart
and you finally get enough pennies
before you to go down there and have your picture made.
Yeah, it's pretty tough. But that's okay.
I mean, we lived through it, didn't we?
Yeah, and we lived through World War II.
The guys coming back from war really enjoyed
going down there with their sweetheart and their mom
and getting their pictures taken in their uniforms and all that.
And then you have all the women who would come in
to get photographs so they can send the pictures
to their husbands or boyfriends in the war.
And those ranged from women
arranging themselves on the little table in these
sort of really provocative poses, like these little pinups,
to standing stiffly.
And I took my girlfriend out
and we had our picture
made together.
And I'm pretty sure I was 16.
And what was it like?
Oh, I burnt that picture a long time ago.
She stood me up and I burnt the picture.
One day, I noticed this package came in to my desk.
It was a large package of photographs.
And it was a little off-putting.
I mean, we used to get hundreds
of submissions a week
from people wanting to get their pictures published.
And it was kind of a tedious chore
to have to open all these things
and 99 or more percent of them we couldn't use.
So, that package sat on my desk for probably at least a week
before I got around
to opening it.
But anyway, umm, I did open it one day
and there was a group of the Disfarmer pictures.
And I was just astonished. I thought,
"Who are these people? Who's this photographer?"
I was immediately taken with them.
They just seemed so powerful, so immediate.
They were sent to me by Peter Miller, so I called Peter
and I said, "How about you and I go into partnership?
If you have enough good pictures like this,
I'll put together a dummy and I'll write a text
and try to find a publisher for them." He said, "Great."
The show and the book got reviewed and it was, like,
instant recognition of how wonderful the work was.
My dad ran a big store in Heber Springs all of my life.
I worked there as a little kid,
selling these people peanut patties
and Nehi orange and grape drinks
when I was 7, 8, 9, 10 years old.
And why a picture of Charlie, that I knew so well,
now, all of a sudden,
was in a book published by a New York publisher
was a total mystery to me and virtually everybody else here.
I came to photography
later in life.
And when I decided to be a portrait photographer,
I spent a great deal of time, before I picked up a camera,
looking at photographs.
I wanted to look at originals, not only read books.
So, I went to The International Center of Photography,
in 1976,
and just happened to see this exhibit
by this old-time photographer, Mike Disfarmer.
I was in Barnes & Noble
and I saw this beautiful book
and it had a beautiful picture of two men together
and they were very close to each other
and very physical with each other and that attracted me.
Then I turned the spine over and it just said "Disfarmer".
And I thought, "What's that?"
So, I sat down and started reading the book.
At first, I was enthralled with the pictures
but then I became kind of fascinated with him.
Those photographs were so compelling
that I found myself going back again and again
but didn't really understand why,
except that now, in retrospect,
I realize it appealed to me innately as a visual
but mostly because of what I saw,
the people that I saw in the photographs.
Ten years after I purchased the book and saw the photographs,
I began to seriously think about going back to Heber Springs
and photographing and see what happened to these people.
I mean, "Do they still have
"that visual grit that I saw in these photographs?
"Are they still there?
That strength of character, has it survived over 50 years?"
What is in my mind is how I know them,
from their photographs by Disfarmer.
And so, when they came in the door,
I fully expected that photograph to appear.
But actually, what I did see
was that person, recognizable but older.
"Oh, it is that person, but it isn't anymore."
People have asked me, like,
"Why did you choose puppetry to tell this story?"
I've always thought that puppets were ciphers,
that they were blank slates
and that you read, on them, anything.
The puppet doesn't cry. You make it cry in your head.
The puppeteer sort of moves it as if it's crying
but you are the one who fills in the blanks.
So, in some ways, the puppet is a cipher.
He's just a blank slate.
And, in looking at the Disfarmer story,
I realized that he was the same thing.
He was a complete blank slate.
It's kind of a quintessentially American story
in that it's the loner who, you know, is toiling alone
and is completely forgotten and then turns out to be a genius.
"Disfarmer" came from, he wasn't a farmer in this area.
He was a dis-farmer.
He had originally been Mike Meyer
and, at some point in his life,
he decided that the Meyer family wasn't his real family,
that he had been taken at birth by a tornado
from his real family and deposited with the Meyers.
And so, he wasn't going to be a Meyer anymore.
And he named himself Disfarmer.
See, his original name was Meyers
and I forgot why he said he turned that to Disfarmer.
Now, you may have got that somewhere else
but I do remember him telling why.
"Disfarmer" meant something in German language.
I can't remember what he said about it.
He thought "Meyer" meant "Farmer" in German,
which it doesn't.
I just think that's fantastic.
And I think he had
the good sense to wait
until his mother died before he officially changed his name.
But it wasn't just something he put on his business card.
Like, he legally had his name changed
and, from what I understand, broke of all ties to his family.
Mike Meyers became obsessed with the notion of a tornado
when his mother's house got blown away.
But he's about half "schiz" and he started thinking about that
and he says, "You know, it makes a pretty good story,
if a tornado had something
to do with me personally."
That's when he composed the notion
that he had been picked up in Indiana in one place
and carried away from his home and deposited
in the Meyers family's yard and there he grew up as a Meyer.
It never occurred to him, I don't think,
till after the tornado blew his mother's house away.
Few things good come out of a storm.
The storm tears it down so it's got to be rebuilt.
Okay, so Meyers, he come in here
and started over and rebuilt himself a profession.
You know when he first started out,
he was in business with a man named Penrose, Penrose & Meyer.
If you look at those images, it's quite interesting.
There's a black background but the props they use,
there's a table with a tablecloth
and a vase with some flowers in it.
Now, when he went into his own business,
he did away with that stuff.
He did away the table, he did away with the tablecloth.
He did away with the flowers. They weren't necessary.
He's just going to take pictures of people and make a living.
When you look at Maia-Mari Sutnik
this gentleman here,
posing with sort of a classic pillar to ennoble him,
and you know, he's shabby as can be--
You know, look at these shoes.
I mean, there's still dust on them, you know.
But he stands by this pillar to elevate the subject.
And he didn't need that.
He felt people came in, they get photographed...
There was so much richness in the subject matter
and he felt comfortable with it.
There's an un-self-consciousness about the photographs
that you do not see in other photographs.
These aren't people who just went in and smiled.
Disfarmer didn't say "Stand a certain way, sit a certain way.
Give me a smile. Show me your teeth. Open your eyes."
Didn't do that.
You probably did not know for sure when the picture was made.
Because you're sitting there or you're standing there,
you're not posing. You're not putting on your pretty smile,
all that sort of thing.
You're just being-- Taking a picture of you as you are.
One of the wonderful things about Disfarmer portraits
was that he included what I consider storytelling details,
which you wouldn't find in a normal studio portrait.
There was an elderly lady that was holding a fan that was
advertised in, you know, Coca-Cola or something,
there was a little boy holding an ice cream cone,
there was a picture of two boys,
once of which had a Disfarmer picture in his hat band,
just all sorts of things
that added another dimension to the pictures.
You look at these pictures, you can't help...
You just can't help yourself. You immediately go,
"Well, she's his brother and he's going off to war,"
or "This is the mother and these are the daughters."
You know, immediately, your mind rushes in
to fill all of the blanks.
And it just invites you to make
tons of narrative detail in your head
about when she bought that dress
and that's a new dress that she's wearing
and she's never worn that hat before
and it doesn't really go with it.
You know, it just goes on and on and on.
I think I had just
got back from overseas
and I came through Chicago.
And I got over there and I saw a liquor store.
And they didn't have no kind of whiskey but cabbage
but they had lots of it.
And I went in there and asked a man, I said,
"How much of that whiskey can you sell me?"
He says, "All of it you want."
Well, I went to next door and I bought a big suitcase
and went back in there
and I said,
"Just see how much of it you can stack in here."
He said, "You got that kind of money, soldier?"
I said, "I've got the money, you just put the whiskey."
And he started putting the whiskey in there
and I started in the counting up the money
and we swapped out there.
And when I left out of there,
I could barely carry this suitcase. I mean, it was heavy.
Look at this picture.
It looks like when you got to Heber Springs,
you were still celebrating.
Yeah, I celebrated a long time. I haven't quit yet.
I really get a lot out of living.
In February 2004,
I was offered a collection Michael Mattis
of 50 original Disfarmers.
And if you're a photography collector,
that's a fairly remarkable thing because nobody
had ever heard of even a single original Disfarmer making it
onto the marketplace, the art market, the photography world.
And this collection had been put together
by two residents, a husband and wife,
of Heber Springs who had moved to the Chicago suburbs.
It was David and Ashleigha Pratt.
And we looked at the collection
and our hearts skipped a few beats because, as I said,
the thought that one would ever see an original Disfarmer
had been the furthest thing from our minds.
And then we went to our library and we pulled out
Julia Scully's original book from 30 years earlier
on Disfarmer where she said,
"Many of the originals can be found in the family albums
of Heber Springs families."
And she had put that tantalizing sentence
and I think nobody had ever followed up on it.
So, we of course bought the 50 from the Pratt family.
And then I was hooked.
Michael's very smart. I think he's literally...
What is he? He's a nuclear physicist, I think,
which is something that a lot of people joke about, you know.
"He's a nuclear--" Well, he is. And he's a very smart man.
And I think he just analyzed the situation
and knew what he wanted to do,
which would be to amass the largest collection of Disfarmer
that anyone thought imaginable.
Michael put together a team that had been trained to identify
the type of print that Michael was interested in
and then just to go out and get as many as you could.
They put a big war map on their wall and set about
to go down every dirt road within a 50 mile radius
of Disfarmer's original studio.
Once Michael realized that this is going to be
more than 100 or 200 photographs,
that this is going to be a serious venture
that's going to take a while
and is going to involve a lot of money,
he needed to have somebody there that he could trust.
And so Hava, who was from a completely different culture,
or set of cultures, was a perfect person
to insinuate herself in a quiet way
into the local community of picture finders.
When I first got there,
there was a period of about two or three weeks of adjustment
where I did not understand
anything that was going on around me.
Right now, I am going to be taking the ticket from the man
and I'm going to stamp his hand.
That gets him into the dancehall.
You know, walking into somebody's house
and seeing a big confederate flag
with the slogan, "She's not coming down,"
I mean, you know, it was sort of, like...
"What?"
But then, after a while, it sort of, like,
I started to understand their way of life.
You don't get judged. Wear whatever you want to wear.
Nobody cares. No one's going to judge you.
No one's going to think differently of you
because you have last season's jeans or whatever
or what kind of car you drive or how fancy your apartment is
or anything like that. It's not about that.
It's very not about that.
I was really nervous at first about it.
I thought, "Oh, a Yankee's coming to town."
And then she became my Yankee friend. She was a good friend.
This is the store
that I purchased
with the sale of the Disfarmer photos.
I had two stores: one in Heber and one Mountain View.
And it became too much for me so I cut it down to one store.
If it hadn't of been for The Disfarmer Project,
I would have never been able to start my own business.
In the beginning, I would go door-to-door.
I carried a little photo maker scanner with me.
I'd carry it in and I would buy their photos
and I could scan it and give them pictures back
and then take the original and sell 'em to Michael.
The whole town started talking about that.
The coffee shop talk was,
"You got a picture made by Mike Meyers?
"If you have, goodness, hang on to it.
It's going to be worth a lot of money."
It was like a scavenger hunt,
almost,
the way the pictures were being found.
"So and so had one," or "Do you know somebody that has this?"
And it become like a... It was literally a scavenger hunt.
Yeah, I sold two or three of them and give some of relatives.
I got a great nephew in New York that-- he's a photographer--
and I gave him two or three.
And then my first wife,
we divorced and she stole some of my pictures out of my album.
That was the best ones, in other words.
Well, I had five of them of a pose situation,
which is very unusual to have.
They come in and looked at 'em and they said,
"They are real different. What about $500 a picture?"
And I says, "Well, that's fine, but if they're so interesting
and so different from anything that you've seen
that Mike Meyers did, uhh,
how about $1,000 a picture?"
They come to Debbie with a box of pictures
and they get $5,000 from her, for a bunch of pictures that,
for the past 20 years or 30 years,
they haven't even looked at.
I thought $1,000 a picture
was absolutely ridiculous
for them to pay me for those five pictures.
You know, it's just unreal. But I took it.
I was contacted by all these
people who were trying to...
buying up the pictures.
This picture, right here, this is my father.
He was on the Heber Springs baseball team.
And I turned down $1,000 for this one picture of my father
because it means something to me.
I remember when he played baseball.
And when he would knock a home run,
I'd go out on the baseball field and hug him and kiss him
and that meant so much to him.
And you know, I remember all those things
and that brought back memories to me.
These pictures, to me, I guess, to sum it up, they're priceless.
Absolutely. I just wouldn't sell my pictures because I thought,
"If they're worth that much to them,
they're worth a whole lot more to me." And I didn't do it.
Well, I don't blame 'em. If they want to sell 'em, sell 'em.
I never owned very many things in my life I wouldn't sell,
if there's enough money involved in it.
I've heard, "What is the value in them old photographs?
"Why would people want to look at something like that?
Why... What makes them different than the other photographer?"
They would show me other pictures, you know,
"Here's another picture of my Aunt Dorothy, you know,
"but this one, you know, here she is, she's smiling,
"she's in front of her house with her car.
Why is this one just a great picture of my great-great aunt?"
Yeah, they couldn't understand it.
It just had to be something to do with an art collector.
His portraits are gripping.
When you see them on the wall, you stop, you wonder,
all these things run through your head.
First of all, there's pictures of a lost America.
So, there's the nostalgic view of this far away land
of American depression years, and in that pregnant time,
between The Great Depression and World War II,
when the stout young sons of the farm took off their coveralls
and put on their country's uniform
and went off to fight in foreign lands.
So, it's a very pregnant time in American history.
And the pictures do a wonderful job of capturing that time.
On a specific level,
the pictures are psychological bullets.
They really go through the people
and really capture what they're all about.
And that's what makes a great portrait.
Where I think his genius lies is this tension
between Disfarmer as the insider and Disfarmer as the outsider.
If you're the studio photographer in a small town,
by definition of your role, you're the ultimate insider
because you're privy to every family's private moments
and public moments of joy, from weddings to funerals,
christenings, high school graduations,
and the private moments when, you know,
boyfriend and girlfriend would want to come
and memorialize their first date or their first kiss
in front of the photographer.
So, you're the ultimate insider.
But Disfarmer himself was also the town's ultimate outsider.
He was a confirmed bachelor in a town that valued large families.
He was a Lutheran in a town, basically,
of Baptists and Methodists.
And he was an atheist to boot, in the middle of the Bible Belt.
His father had fought for the Union Army
and he was in the heart of Dixie.
And he was also something of an intellectual
in a town that valued men of action
rather than men of ideas and men of words.
We would go into the studio
and I remember, as a child, walking in.
You walked in and you kind of
detoured around a wall to get in.
Of course, he had a big sky light up there.
It was very eerie and creepy and I would stand there waiting
and eventually he would part a curtain in the back
and come out.
And there was a board, a strip there
that we kind of would be centred around.
And then he would get his head under his camera.
As kids, we were afraid of him.
When I would go into Mr. Meyers' studio, you know,
I would go in there scared to death
because he put that thing on his head, that big old--
came way down-- and you were scared, really.
And you had a scared look on your face.
And there was a story about how he had that bell
and he would startle the kids.
Scare 'em to death.
If you look at all of
the pictures of children,
they all look like this...
They're all horrified.
They're all completely frightened.
And if you look at the grown-ups,
there's something a little unsettled about them as well,
which means that the people who are in the pictures,
are really in the present tense.
He had such a slow shutter speed
that he had to explain to his subject,
"Now, listen, y'all got to be still."
Because he's going to pick up motion, and people have said,
"He would actually tell us not to blink."
Now we've got somebody, trying not to move,
trying not to blink their eyes
when they feel like they need to.
And that, to me, is an uncomfortable situation.
And what I see when I look at the picture is,
he ha saturated this person with thoughts
and they're standing there
trying to obey all the rules he's laid down
before he takes their picture.
I'm told that he would have a genius
for capturing the person at their natural best
and what I see there is not at all what they were like
when I was standing talking to them on the street.
People consider that a smile is like a mask
and if you're not smiling,
somehow the portrait is more revealing.
So, what are considered
the greatest portraits in photography, think about it,
very few involve smiles.
They involve direct psychological probing
and usually that means
that you don't have
the mask of the smile on your face.
My aunt, mother's sister, her granddaughter said,
"Well, Grandma, none of you smiling."
And she said, "We didn't have anything to smile about."
Now, those Depression days, they was terrible.
There's no joke about it up there.
But everybody in this country grew cotton then.
It's the cotton, corn and hay.
I hoed cotton 10 hours for 75¢.
Not 75¢ an hour, but 75¢ for 10 hours.
And I worked three days of that
and bought me a pair of slippers.
Now, that's one of my stories now.
Here is a poor neighbourhood of The United States of America,
particularly the south. Here are Depression people.
Here are people who work for a living.
Here is the product of the Depression in a poor, poor area.
And Mike Disfarmer has been able to capture it.
This look about these natives,
something that's so fundamental and real
about this particular group of people
in this particular geographical area
in response to the hardships
of the Depression.
We didn't even know there was a depression.
Not one thing changed in our daily lives that let us know
there ever was any depression to react to.
And the very notion that these people in these pictures
are showing the hardships of the Depression
is downright funny and it's still funny to me to this day.
Because they didn't know there was one.
I think everybody was poor but we didn't know it.
I lived on a farm. We grew our food.
We had milk from our cows and pork from our hogs.
And so, we were happy, I thought.
But then our pictures that we made showed this sadness
that some people think that we were experiencing.
But as I say, we didn't know that.
Everybody just kind of helped each other exist.
I mean, you know, if a man needed a shirt on his back,
he'd probably walk down the street
and somebody'd offer him one.
I don't have much experience myself
with what would be called
anonymous photographs
or photographs from flea markets.
We don't handle that sort of thing in the gallery.
So, the clients that we deal with are really people
who are trying to collect important artists
or art of the 20th Century, in our case.
And the reason they would be looking at Disfarmer
is they put him in that ranking.
Well, I had been aware of Disfarmer photographs
for many years. I couldn't tell
you-- But not the vintage ones.
I, like everyone else, had always been told by dealers,
"Oh, there are no vintages ones. They don't exist."
At one point, I heard that there were vintage prints.
And that's when I went and I said, "I love this work.
"Let's find some vintage prints and buy them up
"and begin to see what's good and what's not good
and start to build a collection."
When people first heard that there were going to be
these vintage Disfarmer prints, we all flocked to New York
just to see these things because that--
I mean, in terms of causing an excitement,
it was really quite remarkable when, you know,
people were on the phone to each other like dealers, saying,
you know, "Have you heard what Houk's going to put on?"
And it's this exhibition of, like, vintage Disfarmer prints.
Everyone was like, "Where the hell did he get those?"
And then it was, like, all these different,
"Well, Michael Mattis had been going out and buying these."
People were like, "Well, yeah, it would have to be Mattis
to think of something like that."
Most of us had a fair bit of shock,
you know, looking at these great pictures.
In your mind, you're thinking,
"Yeah, I'd love to own one of these."
And then you go to
the price book
and either it had been sold or it was, like, $20,000.
Nobody knew what the price
should be of a vintage Disfarmer
because there had been
absolutely no marketing
of those prints prior.
And I thought it was high but they sold prints at that price.
So, evidently, there were enough people out there
who believed that was the correct value
and they bought them at that value.
Therefore, I think that those numbers were established.
Originally, when I first had
the glass negatives,
I was making prints myself. I love the process of printing.
But then, as time passed,
I became less interested in photography
so I lent the negatives to a gallery in New York.
And they had a printer Ira Mandelbaum
who really had a feel
for how to print the negatives.
One of the things that I've always felt
about the relationship of a printer to a photographer
is that it's very similar to a composer and a conductor.
A composer creates the music
but the conductor interprets it.
It took me a while to appreciate Disfarmer
because of all the problems in printing it.
They were a headache, really,
especially on first acquaintance.
And that's what dominated my thinking about them
for several years, until I, actually, I think, in one sense,
got to appreciate them as prints
before I really got to appreciate them as portraits.
His photographs are beautiful.
And they bring out everything
you could possibly want to bring out in the subject.
But in truth, they really need to be enlarged
because it brings out so much more in the negative
that you don't really see in small size.
All of a sudden, you can start seeing things
that you didn't see before.
You can see tick bites.
Kids got a bad face on and you look and he's got tick bites.
Of course he's grouchy.
You can see a bandage on a woman's legs.
Blowing them up enhances and changes the photographs.
And, umm, since I was involved in printing these photographs
from the very earliest time,
I tend to think of these photographs,
and the way I printed them, as an interpretation
and the interpretation of these photographs.
I have something to remark on my gravestone.
"He helped bring Disfarmer to the public."
I don't have the mentality of a collector
or the need to own the original when, in a lot of cases,
the enlargements, you can see them better. They're crisper.
The contrast is there. Everything is great.
And, in many ways, they're more accessible.
But there's something about the originals.
Why they'll always be more valuable is because
Disfarmer was such an interesting personality.
Like, a little bit of his personality
is in every one of these actual objects.
And, I think, because of that, especially for a collector,
that's always going to be more valuable
than a bigger, more beautiful enlargement.
Disfarmer was a pure artist.
Maybe he didn't expect that one day
they will be hanging in a rich collector's home
because I don't think that concept existed to him.
That's the mystery of Disfarmer.
I mean, you know, we can talk forever,
a million people can give their opinions,
we'll never know. The man is gone.
It's just part of the mystique in art.
I think it's good we have a little bit of mystique in art.
Some things should never be answered.
The black line should never be resolved and answered.
I'm disappointed if it does get answered.
Those particular photographs
violate, in a sense,
one of the primary rules of photography.
You don't have things growing out of people's heads
when you photograph them. And he does.
He has a black line coming straight out of people's heads
when he photographs them.
I do have a theory about this, and it's simply a theory.
And that is that Mike Disfarmer didn't really care.
My feeling is that he basically used a black background.
And if you look at some of the old photographs of his studio,
that black background has a bar on the bottom,
which means he could have moved it left or right or whatever.
And I feel that the reason
he may have slid over this white background
is on a day when the light wasn't that good
and that gave him more natural light.
And if there was a black tape there,
it was because he had two pieces of white whatever
and he taped them together.
Who was making white tape in those days?
This is new, I mean, colour tape.
So, black tape is what they would have had.
I don't think he paid attention.
This is not a meticulous man.
This is not a man who paid attention
to those kind of details.
Yeah, it's a paradox. It is a paradox.
'Cause I don't feel about him as if he cared.
And yet, you look at the photographs
and you get the feeling that he did.
Because how could he have made those photographs
if he didn't care?
Did he consciously want to have a black line?
I don't know.
Like, it's ingenious when you look at it
because, in terms of what that added
to an otherwise completely mundane background,
was this great visual device.
It works in a graphic element.
It breaks up that image
in a very strange kind of a geometric way.
Everything seems to play off that black line.
And how he got the idea of--
I don't know if it just ended up there accidentally
or if he did see a Mondrian somewhere and he thought,
"Oh, isn't that interesting."
Like, it's because we don't know anything about Disfarmer.
So, it's hard to say how we came up with that.
But it's ingenious when you look at it.
I think that were making probably too much
out of the black line.
But thank goodness it's there
because it makes the pictures more interesting.
Why would I want Disfarmer's photographs
hanging all over my wall?
And sometimes, people come over to my house and they might say,
"Oh, is this your family?"
But yet, anyone who has an eye can look at them
and in about three minutes say there's something special here.
He chose the moment when he was ready to take the photograph.
And I think, what happened was that, in fact,
he had a lot of unhappy sitters.
And one example is I have this one great photograph
where this woman...
In fact, she's so unhappy that she cut down her own photograph.
And the reason I know that is because,
on the back of the photograph, we have some writing from her
about the process of having her photograph taken.
"Is no good. He took it before I knew it.
"Was looking at mom. Tear it up if you want to.
Charles was scared."
If you were a mother
and you wanted to take a photograph of your son,
you want it to be about you and your son. It's a portrait.
But Disfarmer wasn't really interested
in taking intimate portraits.
He was interested in realizing, I think,
his own vision of what he wanted the photograph to be like.
And I think that the people in the community, their role,
in respect to Mike Disfarmer,
was they allowed themselves to be manipulated.
I mean, it's one thing to say, "He caught me off guard once."
But it's another thing to say, "And then I sent my mother
and my father and my kids and I went back every year."
I think that there was some fascination
with this very
oddball character.
And there was some fascination, conscious or unconscious,
with playing their role in whatever that theatre was.
When I got to Heber Springs,
what I wanted to do is find people
who still remember being photographed and interview them
and try to get a bigger picture of who he was.
But when I actually asked them, you know, "What was he like?"
I heard the same thing from everybody.
It seemed the people that were probably very young kids
when Disfarmer was still alive,
all kind of remembered the same details about Disfarmer.
And that's when I realized that they've created
their own cultural mythology about who he was.
And beyond that, I couldn't find anything else.
The thing that was the most illuminating
about my time in Heber Springs
was how none of it was illuminating.
Nobody had anything to say about him.
Nobody knew anything about him. He was just a complete mystery.
And that is fascinating to me.
He's forever going to be a mystery because,
until somebody from New York or from the art world came there,
asking questions about Disfarmer,
I don't think anybody there ever gave it a second thought.
You know, when I went down there,
there was no value to Disfarmer.
They weren't worth a nickel, essentially.
So, nobody had any reason to claim
they had some special relationship to him.
They want to tell you something
and so then they retell this collective memory
that they all have of this crazy guy
who now they learned was actually
a genius.
Mike probably died of
maybe a heart attack.
But he was found dead, in his studio,
with the rats running around and cans of food opened
and just an awful mess.
I estimated that he'd been dead probably about five days.
We, Dad and I, we received him
and brought him to the funeral home and prepared him
and knew that this was going to be another kind of a donation.
We did a number of those back years ago.
My dad and I were sitting having breakfast
about, I don't know, about a month later.
Dad says, "Tom, you know,
one thing we didn't do for Mike."
I said, "Oh, what's that?"
He says, "Well, he doesn't have a marker at his grave."
I says, "Well, so what? What are you going to do about that?
There's a lot of graves don't have markers at 'em."
And he says, "I think he ought to have one."
I says, "Well, so, order him one."
So, Dad ordered him a nice little granite marker,
you know, name and dates on it and everything.
And it's still over there.
Disfarmer's part of us. There's no question about that.
Disfarmer has become part of the community. No doubt.
We wouldn't had this stuff out here for two years
if that weren't true.
We're the Cleburne Country historical society
and we're dealing in this room, for the last two years,
with a phenomenon that's only been a reality since 2004
when somebody learned that the pictures were worth big bucks.
We have wondered why all of you people though
are so intrigued with all of this.
Why have people been so curious
to come from Canada, here,
to study this and find out about it?
We're curious as to why y'all are so curious.
Well, the art world has this way
of focusing, in the end, on quality.
And so, you know, the cream rises.
And so, it took many years in Disfarmer's case, you know,
50 years after his death for him to really have his place
on the pantheon of the art markets. But he's there.
The cream has risen because he really is
one of the great portraitists in history.
They're the people as they were.
And if it were today,
it would be impossible to do that, I think.
I don't think you could ever repeat
what Mike Meyers Disfarmer did.
These pictures have been shown in Europe, in Germany, England,
there was a big retrospective done in Sweden. It's universal.
No matter who it is and no matter what age they are,
what culture, they see themselves,
they see a reflection
of humanity.
And that's the greatness of the photographs.
The point is that they are universal,
they bring back a time,
they have an immediate poignancy.
And, you know, whether people made money on them,
whether people bought and sold them, it doesn't matter.
They're just wonderful pictures.
People come here and do what I'm doing right now.
They stand here at his graveside and stop and think,
"Hey, that man took my grandfather's picture.
And we've got it. And it's one of a kind."
He's still famous here and always will be.
Fact of the matter is, there ought to be
some sort of a monument put up in his memory, somewhere.
You know, "The one and only: Mike Meyers Disfarmer."
I believe I'll go work on that. I can get that done.
Let me do "Amazing Grace" first
All right, "Amazing Grace."