Since the discovery of his Heber Springs, Arkansas studio archives in the 1970s, American photographer Mike Disfarmer (1884–1954) has been the subject of ardent commercial attention and, more recently, art historical intrigue. A Main-Street studio photographer, Disfarmer made portraits now admired for their discerning depictions of rural life between the two World Wars. While his critical success is entirely posthumous, Disfarmer precipitated such acclaim by parading himself not as a craftsman selling photographs, but as an artist making portraits.  The Columbia University Art Properties collection holds a considerable amount of vintage1
 Disfarmer portraits, including photos of families and children. The presence of these photographs in a university collection encourages us to explore how Disfarmer achieved posthumous renown, significant enough to elevate his works from the vernacular category to works of art. Art historian Geoffrey Batchen defines vernacular photography as images taken by anonymous hands and reproduced in great quantities. These images often find themselves decorating the walls of our homes, or filling photo albums, less frequently in the art holdings of a university. 2
 This essay will examine two vintage Disfarmer prints, Darlene Teal, Age 2 Years (1930s) and Evaleon and Gene Higgs (1940s), in their course from cherished family photographs to Columbia. In considering these images alongside the photographic output of the Works Progress Administration, this analysis will question their categorical transference from vernacular to art object, while determining the varied motives behind the depiction of interwar American childhood in portraits.

The first portrait reveals Darlene Teal, a two-year old visitor to the studio (Fig. 1), sitting atop a wooden table. In the postcard sized print (4 9/16 x 2 7/8 in.), Darlene appears ready for a special occasion, wearing a lightly colored dress with lace detailing nearly obscured by light. Her face, as well as her bare forearms and shins, seems as rigorously washed as her apparel. Looking past the camera, likely at an encouraging parent, Darlene’s hands are blurred in a hovering gesture while she crosses her ankles, her feet clad in MaryJane shoes. Framed by straight blonde hair that catches the natural studio lighting, her face is caught somewhere between concentrated rest and a smile. In fading graphite cursive, an inscription on the verso reads: “Darlene Teal Age 2 Years.”

The second photo renders a double portrait of siblings, also young sitters (Fig. 2). Like Darlene, Evaleon and Gene Higgs sit on the edge of the frontally positioned studio table. The portrait of the sister-brother duo is smaller than Darlene’s (3 13/16 x 2 ¾ in), fitting more comfortably into the hands of a viewer. Two-year old Evaleon and her baby brother Gene seem comically mismatched, their faces the masks of comic and tragic allegories. A contented Gene appears mid-laugh, his legs and feet slightly blurred while Evaleon remains tense, her contours clearer than her brother’s, with her left hand forming a fist as she frowns, looking past the camera. Their clothes are not quite as refined as those worn by Darlene; Evaleon wears a patterned dress with black boots, while barefooted Gene wears a collared shirt and overalls. The verso reads “Evaleon Gene Higgs” in blue ink. Given the size of both images, it is easy to envision the double portrait in a family album or sitting framed on a shelf, too small to occupy wall space.

Portraits like these bear familiarity to all viewers. Such images often adorn our homes and are passed on to next-of-kin, along with other emotionally valuable heirlooms. Photos created under circumstances similar to Darlene Teal and Evaleon and Gene Higgs belong to the vernacular genre, a broad subset within photographic taxonomy. Batchen asserts that vernacular photographs may carry great sentimental value, yet little intellectual, artistic, or monetary worth; vernacular pictures are most often found in the domicile and their authors are usually amateurs or professionals hired to document life events.3
 One of countless studio photographers in the United States during the twentieth-century, Disfarmer operated a large-format camera with glass-plate negatives to produce postcard-sized gelatin silver prints of his subjects.4
 Although the portraits entered the Art Properties collection in 2015, their journey from vernacular family photos to art properties begins during Disfarmer’s lifetime, as he understood himself not as a salesperson peddling event and portrait photography, but as an artist.

Born Mike Meyer in Portersville, Indiana, the photographer changed his last name to “Disfarmer” at age fifty-six (i.e., in 1939), an act that most photohistorians understand as one of Disfarmer’s attempts to lambaste his agrarian surroundings and origins.5
Fashioning his persona as a social outsider-cum-artist figure as opposed to a commercial studio photographer, Disfarmer attracted intrigue, albeit locally, in his lifetime.6
 To corroborate his identity as an outsider in the small town and further mythologize himself, Disfarmer told others that at age three he had been carried from Indiana to Arkansas by a tornado.7
Despite these efforts to differentiate himself from the Heber Springs community at large, Columbia’s collection of Disfarmer photographs discloses his interest in photographing its people(Fig. 3). A number of portraits were captured outdoors, featuring individuals, couples, and families, often alongside their pets and farm animals. These photos are similar in their discerning and somber treatment of their subjects; however, scholarship on Disfarmer and his oeuvre lacks such images, engaging only with the studio portraits, usually picturing adults and adolescents.8
 

The portraits in Art Properties date mostly from the time of the Great Depression. While Disfarmer’s output reveals he maintained his work and clientele during this crisis, many other American artists found themselves turning to the aid of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a program brokered under the 1933 New Deal. The WPA provided funding to 5,300 artists, seeking to provide employment and bring the arts to the American public.9
 Considered by the program to be “practical”10
 artists, WPA photographers documented life in the States through the 1930s. Although these photographers chronicled both urban and rural scenes, the portraits shot in the Dust Bowl and American South, conveying the hardships and resignation of poor, rural, and mostly white communities, have become the most enduring images of the Federal Art Project.

One such WPA artist, Arthur Rothstein (1915-1985), photographed families in Mississippi County, Arkansas, just 150 miles from Heber Springs. Rothstein was contracted by the Resettlement Administration (RA) to document farmers as they sought new agricultural work.11
 Two images shot in 1935, Daughter of sharecropper, Mississippi County, Arkansas (Fig. 4) and Sharecropper’s child suffering from rickets and malnutrition, Wilson cotton plantation, Mississippi County, Arkansas ( (Fig.5), represent successful efforts in the documentation of the impoverished agrarian community. Photographed outdoors, each subject is barefoot: the sharecropper’s daughter wears a tarnished dress while the romper of another sharecropper’s infant son is torn. Despite their circumstances, both the young girl and infant boy wear expressions characteristic of childhood. The nameless girl ignores Rothstein’s camera, turning her head away from the lens while giggling, and the infant confronts the photographer indignantly, his bearing reminiscent of Evaleon Higgs’s expression.

Rothstein’s depiction of agrarian childhood differs from Disfarmer’s for a number of reasons, with parental intent the most notable distinction. Parents did not bring their children to Rothstein to be photographed. Instead, he captured his young subjects by venturing to their unkempt domiciles, far from the controlled environment of the studio. Indeed, working at the behest of the federal government to chronicle scenes he determined notable or characteristic of the American experience, Rothstein made documentary photographs. Raised in New York and educated at Columbia University, Rothstein created photographs outside of his cosmopolitan domain, the doldrums of life in the South perhaps more glaring to him as a stranger to the region. Shooting on a 35-millimeter Leica camera, Rothstein submitted the resulting negatives to the RA archive, where they awaited possible publication or wielding in Congress by supporters of the New Deal, seeking to prove the necessity of such agencies as the RA.12
 

By making these portraits, both Rothstein and Disfarmer affirmed the existence of a certain way of living, yet for Rothstein, the request for such affirmation came from a federal agency, rather than the subjects themselves. While Disfarmer actively dissociated himself from fellow Heber Springs residents, his gaze still belonged to the class of his subjects. He was a stranger to his town, but not one sent from a Northern metropolis with WPA funding. We may interpret his 1939 name change from Meyer to Disfarmer not only as an attempt to distance himself from agriculture, but also as a declaration of his own artistry and practice in contrast to the traveling WPA photographers from the North. Experiencing the Depression and Second World War alongside his fellow residents, Disfarmer truthfully captured the inherited stoicism of his clientele, a farming community, and their enduring arduousness through both events13

While Disfarmer enjoyed constant patronage throughout his career, it remained local to Cleburne County. The photography community’s interest in Disfarmer, and the recognition of his work as significant American portraiture, began almost two decades after his 1959 death with the 1976 publication of Disfarmer: The Heber Springs Portraits, 1939-1946. A product of photographer-turned-journalist Peter Miller and Modern Photography editor Julia Scully, the book sought to introduce Disfarmer to a broader audience and identify what made his photographs effective as portraits. Scully determines that the success of the images stems from a synthesis between time, subject, and Disfarmer himself. 14
Although the plates in Scully and Miller’s book, a paramount and non-commercial resource on Disfarmer, include many family portraits, there are very few photos of just children. Further literature on the artist was not issued until the late 1990s, when private collectors began to purchase vintage Disfarmer prints similar to the ones in the Art Properties collection. We may presume that at this point, the portraits of Darlene and the Higgs siblings were removed from family collections in Heber Springs and surrounding communities to be transferred through the hands of private collectors, before reaching Art Properties in 2015 as a gift from alumni and photo-collectors Hugh and Sandra Lawson.

Later publications similarly feature only the portraits taken inside the studio and include few photos of toddlers and adolescents. Existing scholarship on Disfarmer leaves us with many questions on Darlene Teal, Evaleon and Gene Higgs, and the numerous other children placed atop Disfarmer’s studio table. Were these portraits supplemental to the greater family photographs that are better known and circulated? Why did Disfarmer choose to place these three subjects on the edge of the table, rather than the corner, effectively flattening the resulting portraits? And perhaps the most difficult question of all: why are these portraits of children, which make up a notable share of the Disfarmer collection in Art Properties, at all significant?

It is noteworthy that by the 1930s, cut-film and Kodak Brownie cameras were widely available across the United States, enabling anyone to document their family life. Whether they were able to afford Kodak cameras or not, local parents still eagerly visited Disfarmer’s studio, requesting their children be captured through his eyes. A 1940 Census reports that Herbert Higgs, father of Evaleon and Gene (whose names in the Census are spelled Evelyn and Elmer Jean) was employed as a farmer for all 52 weeks of 1939, collecting a salary of $180.15
 At 50 cents per print, the cost to visit to Disfarmer’s studio was considerable for a family like the Higgses. Herbert and his wife Linnie presumably discussed the expense and concluded it was worthwhile, likely familiar with Disfarmer’s portraits due to the town’s small population. Additionally, they perhaps felt pressured to have the photographs made, seeing Disfarmer’s work in the homes of their friends and neighbors. We may determine that the parents of Heber Springs recognized the dignity of their town photographer’s eye and sought to achieve posterity for their descendants in his studio.

Scholarship on the depiction of children in commercial and fine art similarly requires further assessment in light of the Disfarmer portraits. In her book Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (1998), art historian Anne Higonnet outlines the deferral of photography to painterly traditions in the representation of children, arguing that this imitation has resulted in the further propagation of the child as a symbol of happiness and innocence.16
 Batchen refers to this phenomenon as well, citing the task of the professional photographer to encourage young subjects to smile, thus memorializing the image of the “ideal child.”17
 Referencing American art critic Sadakichi Hartmann’s 1907 prediction that photography would proliferate in the home with images of children and motherhood, Higonnet asserts that within the domestic setting, photography could create positive family identity and values, as determined by the parents of the household.18
 Likewise, although Disfarmer himself staged and shot the portraits, parents contributed to the making of the final print by dressing and tidying their children’s appearance. Reading the Art Properties portraits as an effort co-authored by parents and Disfarmer, we understand better their purpose to convey the rendering of Heber Springs life as decorous and dignified. Returning to the question of significance, it could be argued that the co-authoring better fulfilled the WPA’s call to “integrate … the arts in general with the daily life of the community”19
 than a practice such as Rothstein’s could. Although the young sitters divulge their respective nerves, temper, and contentment in front of the camera, Disfarmer allowed the parents of Heber Springs to decide how they wanted their children to be portrayed, a privilege in the practice of portraiture initially reserved for moneyed classes.20

In his greater body of work, the photographs of Darlene and the Higgs children reveal the breadth of Disfarmer’s portrait-making capacities: the three young subjects interact happily, begrudgingly, and nervously with the camera and its operator to create winsome and endearing images, aberrations from what we expect of rural life in inter-war America. While parents attempted to imbue the portraits with their domestic values, the subjects betrayed their age, creating portraits distinct within the Disfarmer oeuvre for their happenstance quality. With this unwitting collaborative effort, revealing the delicate equation at work in the making of a successful portrait, Disfarmer and his young sitters obscure the lines between the vernacular, memory, historical object, and fine art. Darlene and the Higgs siblings, in their small, handheld-sized portraits, exist not in a synthesis of these genres, but somewhere between them.

• 1Vintage photographs refer to the images printed in the artist’s studio, likely by the artist or studio assistant, as opposed to later reproductions made using original negatives. Interest in Disfarmer initially occurred when reproductions of his negatives were published in a local newspaper. See Eren Orbey, “Who Owns Mike Disfarmer’s Photographs?” New Yorker, July 13, 2021.
• 2Geoffrey Batchen, “Vernacular Photographies,” in History of Photography 24:3 (Autumn 2000), 262.
• 3Batchen, “Vernacular Photographies,” 262.
• 4With the exposed glass plates, Disfarmer, or his studio assistant, printed the resulting images onto light sensitive paper coated with silver salted gelatin. This process, known as gelatin silver printing, was the most popular approach to printing since its development in the 1880s, through the 1960s, when color printing was introduced. See Debbie Hess Norris, “Photographs,” in Caring for Your Collections, Arthur Schultz, ed., 65-74 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992), 70.
• 5Alan Trachtenberg, “Imagining Heber Springs,” in Heber Springs Portraits: Continuity and Change in the World Disfarmer Photographed (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 11.
• 6Disfarmer: A Portrait of America, directed by Martin Lavut (Journeyman Pictures, 2010) 02:13-02:58.
• 7Trachtenberg, “Imagining Heber Springs,” 11.
• 8In a recent article in the New Yorker, Eren Orbey notes that portraits of children had little market interest to Disfarmer collectors. Likewise, of the sixteen Disfarmer portraits in the permanent MoMA collection as of September 2021, only one is a portrait of children. See Eren Orbey, “Who Owns Mike Disfarmer’s Photographs?” New Yorker, July 13, 2021.
• 9United States. Works Progress Administration, and Federal Art Project. The WPA Federal Art Project: a Summary, 1.
• 10The WPA Federal Art Project: a Summary (Washington, D.C.: Works Progress Administration), 1.
• 11George Packer. “Introduction.” In The Photographs of Arthur Rothstein, VIII–XIII. (Washington, D.C.: The Library of Congress, 2011), IX. Another New Deal agency, the Resettlement Administration was founded in 1935 to aid impoverished farmers and sharecroppers by either providing resources to improve their existing land or helping them relocate. In 1937 it was succeeded by the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Rexford Guy Tugwell, Professor of Economics at Columbia, spearheaded this effort in addition to other New Deal projects. Tugwell enlisted the aid of fellow Columbia Economics faculty, Roy Stryker to assist in these efforts. Rothstein, a Columbia graduate of the class of 1935, was hired by Stryker. Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library holds the Arthur Rothstein Photographs Collection, which includes his work for the RA, international documentary photographs, and images printed in Life magazine, amongst other papers and negatives.
• 12Packer, “Introduction,” X.
• 13Julia Scully and Peter Miller, Disfarmer: The Heber Springs Portraits, 1939-1946 (Danbury, NH: Addison House, 1976), 6-7.
• 14Scully and Miller, Disfarmer: The Heber Springs Portraits, 12.
• 15“Population Schedule, May 1940, Heber, Cleburne, Arkansas,” Ancestry.com, accessed November 27, 2021. https://www.ancestrylibrary.com/discoveryui-content/view/100167029:2442?gsfn=herbert&gsln=higgs&ml_rpos=1&hovR=1
• 16Anne Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (London and New York: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1998), 73.
• 17Batchen, “Vernacular Photographies,” 267.
• 18Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence, 73 and 89.
• 19The WPA Federal Art Project: a Summary, 1.
• 20Gil Blank, “Eccentric Subjectivity and Authenticity Fiction” in Becoming Disfarmer ed. Chelsea Spengemann (Purchase, New York: Neuberger Museum of Art, 2014), 126.