ORIGINAL DISFARMER PHOTOGRAPHS

Mike Disfarmer
ORIGINAL DISFARMER PHOTOGRAPHS

Photographs: Mike Disfarmer

Text: Alan Trachtenberg, Steven Kasher

Publisher: Steidl

239 pages

Year: 2005

Price: 50 €

Comments: Hardcover under dust jacket, 25,5 x 20,5 cm, b&w photographs. First edition, 2005. Dust jacket in good condition with little edgewear and marks, inside In very good condition.

Original Disfarmer Photographs is the first publication presenting the vintage prints of Mike Disfarmer (1884-1959), one of America's greatest portraitists. For a half century Disfarmer was the people's photographer of Heber Springs, Arkansas. He made studio portraits at pennies a picture to satisfy his rural clients, yet he was an odd genius who created a style of portraiture all his own. Until now Disfarmer has been knoton to the world only through prints made from negatives found years after his death. Now, with the discovery of his vintage prints, we get to see the pictures as he made them.

„The Disfarmer pictures are startling experiences; their subjects come out to us with the vividness and clarity of unaltered reality itself. We must wonder at the art and craft and purpose that produced such a gallery of provincial characters unforgettable in their intense inwardness and vulnerability, etched with the urgency which gives the Disfarmer pictures their aura of inscrutable drama.

A distillation of an acerbic, perhaps tragic view of life with something quirky, homespun, and deeply intuitive, it's the art of Disfarmer that puts him in touch with lime and place, that gives his portraits their power as singular and hence visionary documents."

Alan Trachtenberg

(From the cover flaps)