Bill Frisell

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This past Monday evening I joined several hundred other eager listeners to hear Bill Frisell play some new compositions to accompany the projection of images by Mike Disfarmer, the much heralded photographer from Heber Springs, Arkansas who died in 1959 and left behind some 3000 glass plate negatives of the farm families from the area during the middle of the 20th century. It was a curious mixture of media. I've been fond of Frisell's playing for a number of years, but was totally dumb to Disfarmer's photography. He was truly an eccentric, an antisocial individual who ran a portrait gallery during a time when people could not do photography for themselves. So they went to the photographer in town for a sitting. The results were remarkable portraits stripped of any glamour or artifice which seem to say plenty about the mid century United States.

This from Richard B. Woodward's essay "American Metamorphosis: Disfarmer and the Art of Studio Photography":

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.

There are two online primary sources for Disfarmer prints and information. Most - if not all - of the images during the Frisell performance seem to have come from this source. The other one appears to be collecting oral history about the man and the legend. It's here.

A stimulating evening with influences from all over the place. And stories and leads that go in many different directions as well.