Disfarmer: A Biography

by Richard B. Woodward

Small-town photographers in the first half of the 20th century were once as plentiful as they were taken for granted. The emotional demands of the job could be formidable, even if the artistic challenges traditionally were not. When people lived in one place for many years the relationship between photographers and subjects was often stable and long-term as well. The same person you had posed as a baby on her mother's lap might, if you became a trusted friend, ask for an Easter Sunday or a baptism or a graduation picture and maybe, eventually, for portraits of the wedding party.

It's a puzzle that Mike Meyer, better known as Mike Disfarmer, fell into this gregarious profession and a miracle that he succeeded at it, for most reports indicate that he lacked even basic social skills. The people in the small town of Heber Springs, Arkansas, where he made photographic portraits for more than forty years, remember neither the places he worked nor the man himself as attractive. For a good part of his life (1884-1959) he seems to have been more feared than liked.

“He wasn't friendly,” remembers Charlotte Lacey. “He was not talkative.” There was not so much as a how-do-you-do from the proprietor when you walked into the Disfarmer Studio, “this big open empty room” with “damp walls.” Photographed in her school band uniform as a girl, during the early 1940s, Lacey recalls the sight of the dour man vanishing under the camera cloth for minutes at a time as “very spooky and scary.”

“There wasn't much of a greeting when you walked in, I'll tell you that,” says Tom Olmstead. He had his portrait taken, both as a boy and as a young man, and describes a studio that lacked any accoutrements to calm a restive child or impress a passerby. “It was a concrete building with a concrete floor, very plain. The furnishings were almost nil, a few sticks of furniture. Nothing on the walls.” Nor are there records that the host ever thanked his customers for stopping by or helped them to get comfortable in front of the camera. “Instead of telling you to smile, he just took the picture,” says Olmstead. “No ‘cheese' or anything. You didn't even know when the picture was taken.”

Bessie Utley, who worked as Disfarmer's assistant in the ‘40s, has not painted a picture of a businessman who wanted to ingratiate himself with his clients. “He could be real mean sometimes with ‘em,” she recalled. In particular he could be a martinet in posing his subjects, barking out instructions: “‘You stand over here, you look this way or you look that,' and he wouldn't be nice.”

Then again, the oddity of a misanthrope like Disfarmer choosing to spend every day of every week (the studio was open seven days) in the company of strangers is no more puzzling than many other aspects of his life, most notably how this small-town photographer could have produced dozens of portraits that in their simplicity, restraint, elegance, and penetrating social gaze rank with the finest produced in the 20th century.

What we don't know about Disfarmer far outweighs the collection of facts—and myths—that diligent researchers such as Peter Miller, Julia Scully, Toba Tucker, and Alan Trachtenberg have pieced together. Prior to the body of research uncovered by The Disfarmer Project, the chief evidence about Disfarmer's career has consisted of the negatives saved by the late Joe Allbright. A recent resident in Heber Springs, having moved there only in the late 1950s, he had the foresight to recognize that the contents of a dead man's run-down photography studio might be valuable. (No one else thought so: in 1961 he bought the works—negatives, camera equipment, and plenty of junk—from a local bank for five dollars.) In 1973 he resold the 10-15 boxes of glass plates for one dollar to the newspaper editor Peter Miller who saw the pictures as special and spent a year cleaning the emulsion of mold and dirt, following a formula provided to him by Eastman Kodak.

Miller managed to rescue about 3,000 of the 4,000 negatives, make modern prints, and send a selection to Julia Scully, then an editor of Modern Photography magazine. Her sponsorship of the work, resulting in a 1976 book that coincided with an exhibition at the International Center of Photography in New York, is largely responsible for Disfarmer's posthumous fame. The biographical information unearthed by Toba Tucker during several trips to Heber Springs, beginning in 1989, when she interviewed and rephotographed many of Disfarmer's subjects, has also proven invaluable. Now, thanks to the efforts of collector Michael Mattis, who in the last two years has funded a massive search for Disfarmer vintage prints and ephemera in the Heber Springs and Cleburne County area, we have an even wider view of how the photographer functioned in his studio and the community.

So who was Mike Meyer/Mike Disfarmer? What little we know about his private life suggests that during his 75 years he may have undergone several transformations. The most famous of these—his legal petition in 1939 to change his surname from Meyer to Disfarmer—is the source of his popular reputation as a kind of outsider artist, a naïve and slightly demented genius. He had apparently considered renaming himself for some time before taking legal action. The death of his mother, in 1935, seems to have been the emotional trigger for it, leading him to cut ties to all his relatives. In a bizarre letter that he wrote to his nephew on January 29, 1936, now in the possession of Toba Tucker, he related what in more recent decades might be labeled an “alien abduction” story—a jumbled creation myth about his origins, having nothing to do with his actual birth in Indiana in 1884.

For starters, he claimed that an “old man” told Mike he was not kin to the people who had known him all his life. Instead, his real name was “either Charles Cave or Charles August Cudahy” and he had been carried across the Indiana farmlands by a tornado and deposited in the Meyers' yard. There was a “Real Uncle Mike Meyer,” he confided. (The letter is addressed “Dear Foster Nephew.”) That fellow, however, “blew away in the same storm I came in,” then died, only to be found nine years later.

The story gets stranger. The remains of this other Mike Meyer were found—“a little piece of his dress, little pieces of bones”—and given to his real mother “who called it her little Mike and huged <sic> it and wept.” She then put this bundle into a big doll, “played with it and huged <sic> and loved it and called it her little Mike.” The bundle was supposed to be buried with Meyer's grandmother (a woman named Margretha Weidenhammer). The photographer Mike Meyer was never told about this secret, however, and so burned the bundle and the doll and “threw the Ashes into the Ditch in front of my studio.” Thus was one Mike Meyer buried and another reborn.

His formal petition to become Disfarmer three years later is no less queer and was reported as such in the local newspaper under the headline: “Truth is Stranger Than Fiction.” He was changing his name, the reporter said, because “‘meyer' means ‘farmer' in German, and since the petitioner was not a farmer, he chanced upon the name ‘disfarmer.' ‘Dis' is said to mean ‘not' in German.”

Emotional distress may well have plagued Meyer from an early age. In 1892, when he was 8, his father moved the family—a wife, three boys and four girls— from Indiana to Stuttgart, Arkansas in order to be part of a Lutheran religious community. Both parents were of German-American stock and Mr. Meyer had fought for the Union during the Civil War with the Indiana volunteers. But six years after the migration to the South, where he had taken up rice farming, he died. His second-to-youngest son, Mike, was only 14.

The next 16 years of Disfarmer's life are a tantalizing blank. Perhaps he traveled to Elmira, New York, as he told one Arkansas acquaintance. What we do know is that by 1914, when he was 30, he and his mother had settled in Heber Springs. A photograph of the house suggests that they enjoyed a fair level of prosperity. A pair of dormers show two large bedrooms or more upstairs. There was a long front porch, and kitchen facilities off the back. It was here that he set up his first known photography studio. He is remembered by a niece as a sweet and happy man.

What stability these years may have represented did not last long. In 1926 a tornado touched down in Heber Springs and reduced the Meyer home to kindling. Both he and his mother escaped harm. Although he was by this time already in business for himself as a photographer, he was once again uprooted. He was 42.

Did this cataclysm so agitate Meyer's imagination that in coming years he saw himself swept up in storms and deposited in the backyard of a stranger? Or are the origins of the Disfarmer persona—of his alienation from the rural populace of Heber Springs—traceable to his father's fate as a Yankee who died young on his rice farm? Were superior airs to be found elsewhere in the Meyer family or just in this talented portrait photographer? Did his neighbors regard his fantastic story of personal transformation as entertainment, a hoax, what Huck Finn called “a stretcher”? Or did they view it as proof that he had completely lost his mind?

In searching for answers, Trachtenberg has written what may be the best explanation we are likely to find: “Motives for such a yarn, such a grand fiction of self-remaking, lie beyond all surmise. They belong to the realm of folklore and magic and to the shadier psychic recesses of the Ozark hills during the travail of the Great Depression.”

It is sometimes forgotten that Meyer was not a native, having first set foot in Heber Springs, so far we know, at the age of 30 when his mother moved there in 1914. He was therefore neither lifelong nor even high school pals with any of the people he photographed. What's more, in a place where many had family roots going back several generations, his went back to Indiana. (Or, if you believe the international version of his wind-blown conception, to Germany.) He was not technically a Southerner.

Unusual personal habits further distanced him from his neighbors. He never married. Utley is the only woman with whom he has been linked, and her testimony is contradictory. She claimed that he “never made any passes or anything—he was a perfect gentleman”, but also that “he couldn't keep his hands off of me, and I told him that's what he'd better do is keep his hands off of me. And he said he would.”

Nor did he have friends, male or female. Heber Springs was a town of about 3,800 people when he moved there, and he seemed eager to get to know none of them. He attended a few meetings at the Mason Lodge; and he liked to play the fiddle with a barber/guitarist named Albert Hendrix. Country music was Disfarmer's only known interest other than photography and Hendrix his only known companion. But as Scully notes, these regular musical get-togethers “hardly amounted to friendship.” He paid far more attention to people as artistic problems to solve, sometimes taking as long as an hour to make a portrait, than as individuals with lives outside his studio. His adopting the name Disfarmer put on a legal document what was already a fait accompli. Neither by birth nor temperament was Mike Meyer a member of this community.

Thirty is a late age to be taking up photography, so it is more than likely that Meyer had educated himself in the basics of exposing film and making prints much earlier than 1914, when his mother moved to Heber Springs. The town of Stuttgart, a hundred miles away, where he lived from ages 8 to 16 (and maybe until he was 30?), had a series of photography studios—E.K. Blush, Buerkle, H.E. Downing, Kettering, and Snodgrass—from the 1890s to the 1940s Meyer may have apprenticed at one of them. Or perhaps, like photographers before and since, he taught himself. However it happened, he was proficient enough by 1915 to have his name affixed to a business sign on the south side of Main Street in Heber Springs.

The Penrose & Meyer Studio, located in the lobby of the Jackson Theatre, seems to have reached a swankier customer base than the one Disfarmer later relied on. In the dozen or so surviving prints located by The Disfarmer Project, dating from approximately 1915-20, the portrait subjects are for the most part well-dressed and middle-class. They don't wear overalls or bear other traces of the working poor. Heber Springs in the early decades of the century was a tourist destination, with many summer hotels, cinemas and a bowling alley. Before Prohibition it was wide open, with numerous bars and much rowdiness. Penrose & Meyer may well have solicited visitors to the Jackson Theatre who were in town to catch a play or vaudeville act and who wanted to top off the excursion with a photograph.

The burning of the Jackson Theatre in 1921 ended the partnership, with Penrose leaving town soon thereafter. Meyer set up business on his own, buying up plots of land in 1923-24 on First Street, just off of Main, and building his studio there in either 1925 or 1926. After the tornado wiped out his mother's house, he made the place his new residence.

The Meyer Studio (at the same address that became, after the name change in 1939, the Disfarmer Studio) was modern for its time and place. Such a design, with its slanting skylight and northern exposure, had long been familiar in urban areas but in the rural South in the mid-‘20s it must have been a striking sight, especially with its stripped-down concrete interior and stucco façade.

The ritual of having your portrait made by Disfarmer, the crazy man who claimed he grew up in a potato hole, did not lose its charm for many years. Utley remembered “it was terrible busy on Saturdays because that's when all the farmers come to town. I don't care if they had their picture made last week, they wanted it made again this week…. It just went on and on like that. That was a good paying business.”

He did even better during World War II, when photographs became precious keepsakes for wives and mothers who wanted images of their men before they were shipped overseas, perhaps to die. These men, too, wanted portraits of the people back home so they could remember why they were fighting a war.

Eventually the customers stopped coming. The steep drop-off in Disfarmer's productivity during the early ‘50s may be the result of several factors. He was approaching seventy and starting to drink more heavily. He kept up appearances by wearing his uniform of a clean white shirt and dark pants. But his diet was poor, consisting of nothing but chocolate ice cream, according to one witness. His eccentricities made him a target for children who would knock on his door and run away. He became a kind of male witch, the Boo Radley of Heber Springs.

He was dead for a couple of days before anyone missed him. Breaking into the studio, they found him lying on some newspapers. Two years later when Allbright, his wife, and children gained permission to search the place in hopes of finding something worth salvaging, they discovered more than $8,000 in saving bonds and hundreds of dollars in cash

To the citizens of Heber Springs, the photographs of his that they can pick out in family albums represent first of all—and most of all—individuals that they or their parents or grandparents knew. They are names before they are faces.

For the rest of us, though, it is the reverse. It is the expressions and gestures, clothes and hairstyles—the anonymous humanity—that holds our attention. To many of the people here we can feel inexplicably attached even though we never knew them or their families. Disfarmer's photographs—inadvertent elegies for a small town, a region, an era, a way of life—have to been seen outside their origins to be fully appreciated.

They are also a tribute to the passing of a profession. It is tempting to think that many other towns had photographers as gifted as Disfarmer, and that their work was either destroyed by locals who didn't recognize its worth or still lies buried in an archive. But what Disfarmer accomplished was not easily duplicated. The small-town photographer is figuratively and literally a thing of the past, and Disfarmer sui generis.

Julia Scully from time to time receives old photographs from people who know of her connection to Disfarmer and who want her to validate their finds. “It's been more than thirty years since I saw first saw the work of Disfarmer,” she says, “and I haven't seen anything comparable in quality or emotional impact. Nothing even close.”

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This text is excerpted from Richard B. Woodward's essay “American Metamorphosis: Disfarmer and the Art of Studio Photography” in the book Disfarmer: The Vintage Prints. To order copies of this book, please visit our store.

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