I am not so naïve as to believe that keen interest in the work of minor photographers, even those with artistic ambitions, is not in large measure the product of clever and relentless marketing. However, the current competition (no other word would do in this instance) to sell the work of Mike Disfarmer, a portrait photographer from Heber, Arkansas, takes such strategies to a new heights or depths depending on your point of view.
Two exhibitions of this early to mid-20th century photographer opened the fall season in New York in September, at the Edwynn Houk Gallery and the Steven Kasher Gallery. Two books were also being published in conjunction with the shows.
The fascination with and further beatification of Disfarmer, who died in 1959, focuses on a tried and true critical assessment, that his work is both fundamentally authentic and unabashedly vernacular. But all of this canonization let alone salesmanship wouldn’t have been possible were there not literally thousands of his images, vintage ones at that, newly available to the enterprising dealers involved. Without an ample supply of artifacts, the renewed drive to promote Disfarmer both critically and commercially would have failed from the outset for sheer lack of opportunity.
Prior to this latest rediscovery, Disfarmer’s work was already relatively well-known and celebrated, having been the subject of previous exhibitions and publications as early as 1976. Indeed, Steven Kasher, one of the two collectors responsible for the renewed interest and market, once worked at a gallery that still sells Disfarmer’s prints, but not vintage ones. The Howard Greenberg Gallery owns some of Disfarmer’s glass negatives and has had contemporary prints made from them, but the new trove was made by the photographer himself, always a significant difference both aesthetically and economically.
When news of vintage Disfarmer prints became known to Mr. Kasher and Michael Mattis, another New York collector, the race was on to acquire as many outstanding examples as possible. As it turned out, there were thousands of them to be had because Disfarmer made multiple examples of many of his images of ordinary folk so that several members of their extended families could each own a copy.
The daunting task Mssrs. Kasher and Mattis faced was how to find these pictures, assess their physical condition, and acquire as many of them as they could. As Philip Gefter wrote in the New York Times, to do so Mattis went about it in a particularly imaginative and unique way. He hired local people on the assumption local subjects and owners would be more receptive to their inquiries than those from an outsider, particularly one from the Big City. “He found some scouts by searching for the Heber Springs ZIP codes on eBay, others by word of mouth,” Gefter wrote. These agents required training but soon became quite adept, knowing when to make an offer or pass.
In the end the two dealers acquired roughly 3400 vintage prints, all about the size of postcards. Gefter points out Kasher and Mattis even traded images between them, adding “friendly” to the competition.
The two current exhibitions were culled from these news acquisitions.
What, then, are we to make of the enthusiasms Disfarmer’s work engenders? All of his images are of unimportant people in the grand scheme of things, complete strangers from a strange land that no longer exists, at least not as reflected here, who stare out at us from mostly unassuming poses. Heber, a town of roughly 2000 in Disfarmer’s day, was surrounded by farms. Most current gallery goers will have little if any acquaintance with small town America, especially one in a sparsely settled state. There is nothing quaint about Heber or its residents but there is a quality to them that taps into the current vogue for all things democratic and nostalgic. Physiognomy has literally changed since mid-20th century. Faces today are not nearly as drawn as many seen here; bodies are neither as short nor as slender. Though some subjects mug for the camera, most stand primly, shyly or matter-of-factly, the opposite of today’s more likely in-your-face approach by both subject and photographer.
It is hardly an exaggeration to say that a culture such as ours, inundated by reality shows of one sort or another, is starved for artifacts and expressions that were not contrived. And yet the experience of going to a portrait studio is always fraught, at least for the subjects. Ultimately, what gives these images their power is not our expectations of them but the subjects’ conviction that the capturing of their likeness will matter, if not to us, certainly to them and their kin.
Disfarmer, on the other hand, had his own ambitions. According to accounts from some of his subjects he fretted over the lighting, almost always natural, in his bare studio, sometimes taking as long as an hour to position his subjects to his liking. There was little if any small talk or attempt to put his subjects at ease. His focus was squarely on the ground glass under the black hood. Most if not all of his customers were used to such treatment from a man they viewed as eccentric.
Mike Disfarmer, nee Mike Meyer, went so far as to change his name in a move seen as more than a little unusual as far as the local populace was concerned. Surrounded by real farmers, Disfarmer’s nom de guerre was more than ironic. If nothing else, it confirmed what everyone already knew about him; he was sui generis.
Below are links to various sites offering samples of Mike Disfarmer’s work:
http://www.disfarmer.com/
http://www.stevenkasher.com/html/artistresults.asp?artist=149
Thursday, October 06, 2005
Monday, July 18, 2005
Aspiring Artist
Irving Penn: Platinum Prints, currently at the National Gallery
of Art in Washington until October 2, 2005, is a surprisingly
impoverished show despite its literal use of precious metals.
Penn is best known for his work for fashion magazines such as Vogue, some of which is included here, but this exhibition makes it clear he wasn’t satisfied solely with a reputation in the trades; having spent many a season in commerce, he was determined to be recognized as an artist as well. Despite these loftier ambitions, however, Penn’s work fails to excite the imagination, and, surprisingly, neither does his technique, laboriously executed and dutifully recorded in some of his notebooks that accompany the work.
Walking around this exhibition one finds numerous clues as to the identities of those artists, not just photographers, who inspired Penn. Diane Arbus and August Sander clearly made an impression as did Nadar, Cecil Beaton and Bill Brandt; but so, too, did nearly the entire Surrealist and Dada entourage as well as the great still life painter Giorgio Morandi. Despite these rich and varied sources, the flatterer fails to measure up to the objects of his desire in nearly every instance. In one particularly feeble example, a clumsy still life entitled Composition with Skull and Pear, we even find the “chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and umbrella” played out by proxies including a typewriter, skull and other objects. Unlike the image evoked by the Comte de Lautréamont, Penn’s work falls flat in every regard, vainly substituting clutter for profundity.
Some time in the 1970’s Penn turned his camera toward found objects, more residue from his Dadaist leanings. The results were huge platinum prints of cigarette butts and other urban detritus, lifted as were the originals, literally from the gutter and displaced into a context where one expected to see art. But Penn, seemingly insecure, felt compelled to intervene and fiddle endlessly with the objects themselves (judging by the notes describing his experimentation with the platinum process), turning them into prints of enormous preciousness if not subtlety, unsure whether or not they could stand or their own or, more likely, afraid his own role would go under-appreciated were he to allow them to do so.
Nowhere are Penn’s artistic aspirations more forcefully and unsuccessfully announced than in his regrettable decision, years after the fact, to take the test prints he originally made to learn how to control the platinum process as well as conserve resources (platinum is, after all, expensive) and assemble them as new collages. Why he felt the need to share these fragments, simple by-products of the process, remains unclear. If these were intended to evoke unconscious associations they fail, monumentally, instead underscoring another self-conscious attempt to force new readings where none existed, like some sphinx without a riddle.
The Penn with artistic pretensions is perhaps best known for his portraits of ordinary folk including Hells Angels, the citizens of Cuzco, Peru, and tribesmen from New Guinea. The Peruvian portraits include one of his most famous pictures from the period, that of a very young brother and sister standing in a barren studio consisting of a stone floor and drapery and leaning on a pedestal more than half their size. The visitor to the exhibition is informed that Penn had been in Peru on another matter, traveled to Cuzco and discovered a local portrait studio there. He promptly paid the owner to take a vacation for a few days and leave the studio to him. Once established in his new temporary quarters, Penn turned the tables on the local subjects who ventured in for a session by paying them to pose rather than the other way around. With the exception of the portrait of the two siblings, which derives its notoriety from the dislocating scale, austerity of the surroundings and poses by children that seem at once far more mature than their actual years and much more expressive than those of any of their compatriots, the portraits from Peru lack the vernacular authenticity one would expect the titular owner of the studio no doubt achieved on a regular basis. Penn remains a tourist, fittingly one with money to spend.
What would a Penn exhibition be without true celebrity portraits? These are well-represented here with photographs of Colette, Saul Steinberg, Edmund Wilson, Picasso, and Woody Allen (dressed as Chaplin) among others. But no matter who the photographer, celebrity portraits often present us with little more than an “Ah-ha”experience, affirming previously held perceptions rather than offering fresh perspectives, and Penn’s certainly are no exception to that tradition. His portrait of Alberto Giacometti, carefully composed and scrupulously considered, is nevertheless dull and surprising lifeless, especially when compared to one of the same subject by Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose off-handed, spontaneous approach, succeeds in startling us by seeing Giacometti precisely as one of his own tall, striding stick-like figures.
Penn’s portraits of workers and tradesmen are also dim reminders of those who came before him and were passionate if not consumed by the cataloging impulse. August Sander’s ambitious undertaking to photograph the entire German nation might have resulted in stereotypes of the worst sort were he not fascinated by and intimately familiar with the individuals in front of his lens, not just the categories they represented. Penn’s portraits, on the other hand, are mere shells; the people inhabiting the outfits and lugging the implements of their trades to his studio were merely mannequins on which to hang their props. Come to think of it, in this regard at least he finally if unwittingly closed the gap between his own competing identities.
Penn is best known for his work for fashion magazines such as Vogue, some of which is included here, but this exhibition makes it clear he wasn’t satisfied solely with a reputation in the trades; having spent many a season in commerce, he was determined to be recognized as an artist as well. Despite these loftier ambitions, however, Penn’s work fails to excite the imagination, and, surprisingly, neither does his technique, laboriously executed and dutifully recorded in some of his notebooks that accompany the work.
Walking around this exhibition one finds numerous clues as to the identities of those artists, not just photographers, who inspired Penn. Diane Arbus and August Sander clearly made an impression as did Nadar, Cecil Beaton and Bill Brandt; but so, too, did nearly the entire Surrealist and Dada entourage as well as the great still life painter Giorgio Morandi. Despite these rich and varied sources, the flatterer fails to measure up to the objects of his desire in nearly every instance. In one particularly feeble example, a clumsy still life entitled Composition with Skull and Pear, we even find the “chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and umbrella” played out by proxies including a typewriter, skull and other objects. Unlike the image evoked by the Comte de Lautréamont, Penn’s work falls flat in every regard, vainly substituting clutter for profundity.
Some time in the 1970’s Penn turned his camera toward found objects, more residue from his Dadaist leanings. The results were huge platinum prints of cigarette butts and other urban detritus, lifted as were the originals, literally from the gutter and displaced into a context where one expected to see art. But Penn, seemingly insecure, felt compelled to intervene and fiddle endlessly with the objects themselves (judging by the notes describing his experimentation with the platinum process), turning them into prints of enormous preciousness if not subtlety, unsure whether or not they could stand or their own or, more likely, afraid his own role would go under-appreciated were he to allow them to do so.
Nowhere are Penn’s artistic aspirations more forcefully and unsuccessfully announced than in his regrettable decision, years after the fact, to take the test prints he originally made to learn how to control the platinum process as well as conserve resources (platinum is, after all, expensive) and assemble them as new collages. Why he felt the need to share these fragments, simple by-products of the process, remains unclear. If these were intended to evoke unconscious associations they fail, monumentally, instead underscoring another self-conscious attempt to force new readings where none existed, like some sphinx without a riddle.
The Penn with artistic pretensions is perhaps best known for his portraits of ordinary folk including Hells Angels, the citizens of Cuzco, Peru, and tribesmen from New Guinea. The Peruvian portraits include one of his most famous pictures from the period, that of a very young brother and sister standing in a barren studio consisting of a stone floor and drapery and leaning on a pedestal more than half their size. The visitor to the exhibition is informed that Penn had been in Peru on another matter, traveled to Cuzco and discovered a local portrait studio there. He promptly paid the owner to take a vacation for a few days and leave the studio to him. Once established in his new temporary quarters, Penn turned the tables on the local subjects who ventured in for a session by paying them to pose rather than the other way around. With the exception of the portrait of the two siblings, which derives its notoriety from the dislocating scale, austerity of the surroundings and poses by children that seem at once far more mature than their actual years and much more expressive than those of any of their compatriots, the portraits from Peru lack the vernacular authenticity one would expect the titular owner of the studio no doubt achieved on a regular basis. Penn remains a tourist, fittingly one with money to spend.
What would a Penn exhibition be without true celebrity portraits? These are well-represented here with photographs of Colette, Saul Steinberg, Edmund Wilson, Picasso, and Woody Allen (dressed as Chaplin) among others. But no matter who the photographer, celebrity portraits often present us with little more than an “Ah-ha”experience, affirming previously held perceptions rather than offering fresh perspectives, and Penn’s certainly are no exception to that tradition. His portrait of Alberto Giacometti, carefully composed and scrupulously considered, is nevertheless dull and surprising lifeless, especially when compared to one of the same subject by Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose off-handed, spontaneous approach, succeeds in startling us by seeing Giacometti precisely as one of his own tall, striding stick-like figures.
Penn’s portraits of workers and tradesmen are also dim reminders of those who came before him and were passionate if not consumed by the cataloging impulse. August Sander’s ambitious undertaking to photograph the entire German nation might have resulted in stereotypes of the worst sort were he not fascinated by and intimately familiar with the individuals in front of his lens, not just the categories they represented. Penn’s portraits, on the other hand, are mere shells; the people inhabiting the outfits and lugging the implements of their trades to his studio were merely mannequins on which to hang their props. Come to think of it, in this regard at least he finally if unwittingly closed the gap between his own competing identities.
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