Disfarmer, 1939-1946 (First Edition, Limited)

A$250 · Offered by Harry Hartog Rare Books

First edition

DISFARMER, Mike (text Julia Scully; ed. designed Jack Woody). Disfarmer: Heber Springs Portraits, 1939–1946. Santa Fe, New Mexico: Twin Palms Publishers, 1996. Small Quarto. Original black publisher's cloth, lettered in white. Pictorial dust jacket. 206, [i] pp. 180 gravure plates. Printed on a sheet-fed gravure press in Kyoto. First edition. Limited to 4,000 unnumbered copies. Mike Disfarmer (1884–1959) was born Mike Meyer in Indiana, the son of German immigrants, and moved with his family to Arkansas in 1892. At some point in middle age he changed his surname — meier being an archaic German term for farmer, Disfarmer a direct repudiation of the name and presumably the identity — and settled in the small town of Heber Springs, where he built a modest studio with a large north-facing window and operated it as a commercial photographer for four decades. He charged fifty cents for three prints, did not coax his subjects into smiling, provided no props or painted backdrops, and lit everything with natural light. He died alone in his studio in 1959, in possession of thousands of glass-plate negatives, intestate and unrecognised. The negatives were purchased by a former Heber Springs mayor, who in 1973 brought them to the attention of Peter Miller, then editor of the local newspaper. Miller spent a year publishing the portraits in his paper and preserving the glass plates; he sent prints to Julia Scully at Modern Photography magazine, who immediately understood their significance.

• Binding: Hardcover

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.