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The New Yorker
U.S. Journal

Who Owns Mike Disfarmer's Photographs?

Strangers made his small-town portraits famous in the art world.
Decades later, his heirs want control of the estate.

By Eren Orbey

July 13, 2021

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Ellen Stewart holding her parents wedding photo taken by Mike
Disfarmer.
Ellen Stewart, one of Disfarmer's great-nieces, holds a portrait that
he took of her parents on their wedding day.Photograph by Rachel
Boillot for The New Yorker

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In the nineteen-sixties, a choir of young folk musicians started a
commune called the Group, Inc., and settled in the foothills of the
Arkansas Ozarks. Industrious and conservative, the Group distanced
itself from the free-love ethos of the era, leading local Boy and
Girl Scout troops and establishing several reputable businesses,
including a family-friendly dinner theatre. Still, as outsiders in an
insular rural community, they became targets of animosity. After
Group members voted as a bloc in a contentious local election, night
riders from an opposing side vandalized their compound, throwing
stones and firing rifles. In 1973, in an attempt to build good will,
the Group founded a newspaper, the Arkansas Sun, which ran doting
items on regional history and a photo-identification contest
featuring old snapshots submitted by readers.

One morning, a Group member who edited the paper, Peter Miller, got a
call from a former mayor of the town of Heber Springs, offering him a
hoard of historical images. It was the lifework of Mike Disfarmer, a
photographer who'd operated a portrait studio during the first half
of the twentieth century, charging clients two quarters for a trio of
postcard-size prints. Disfarmer never married or had children, and he
died, in 1959, without leaving a will. His studio, on Heber Springs's
main drag, sat vacant for two years. When it was scheduled to be
levelled, to make way for a new Piggly Wiggly, the former mayor paid
the local bank a token sum of five dollars to acquire Disfarmer's
belongings, including hundreds of slender cardboard boxes that
contained his original glass-plate negatives. The plates had been
moldering in the mayor's garage for more than a decade.

[eren_orbey]
Eren Orbey is a contributing writer at The New Yorker.
More:Copyright lawPhotographyArkansasInheritanceArt

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