Disfarmer
Disfarmer is another photographer I’m kicking myself for never learning about ’till now, or at least ’till the other day when I came across his name on The Sartorialist. How on earth could I never have stumbled upon one of his pictures this summer when I was obessively looking up everyday people fashion photos from the ’30s and ’40s?
Well, the pictures, like the photographer, are sort of elusive. The only ones I could find online had big, ugly watermarks across them (they make me so mad!) so in the end I just sloppily got rid of them in Photoshop, which explains the strange blurs against the subjects’ midsections. Fortunately finding out about Mike Disfarmer and his photos was a lot easier; I think I ended up spending an hour straight just reading articles on them. It’s an easy sort of a story to get absorbed in: a German immigrant’s son who believes himself to be above the family business of farming (he changed his last name to Disfarmer, meaning “not a farmer”), goes into photography instead and starts photographing the townspeople of rural 1930s Heber Springs, Arkansas in his studio.
These photos aren’t the kinds I usually do posts on–they’re about as far from the fairy tale-ish, soft focus autochromes as you can get with their stark realism, everyday clothes, and almost complete lack of props and flowery backgrounds. I read that Disfarmer, pretty much known for his eccentricity, would set up his camera and position his subjects without saying much of anything at all, and would fire the flash without a bit of warning. And I also read that most of the subjects were so far removed from the world of fashion magazines and fancy portraiture that they wouldn’t really know the proper way to pose anyway, and so they stood for the camera just as they’d normally stand, maybe fairly casually with lazy posture, or maybe a bit sadly.
Plenty of the subjects do look happy, though most of them seem to be the young people, the teenagers and the couples. But lots of the subjects look like the hard-edged characters you’d expect to find in a Steinbeck novel or see in a Dorothea Lange photograph . . . It’s so easy to get a little lost in these portraits and to start imagining up lives for the subjects in them. They make me wish I had a time-machine and a way to travel back to rural America in the ’30s and ’40s; as tough as things were, I bet people still had wonderful times in those days. Can you imagine how simple it must have been? No internet, no need to keep up with what was going on in the big cities . . . Walking about a dusty little downtown in a no-frills cotton dress and flat shoes and drinking a Coca Cola on the front porch of a little wooden store sounds sort of like heaven.
