Friday May 7, 2010

North Adams Transcript

NORTH ADAMS -- Puppets are at the center of a performance that uncovers the life of an eccentric photographer renowned for capturing people at the height of discomfort.

"Disfarmer" will be performed Saturday, May 8, at 8 p.m. and Sunday, May 9, at 3 p.m. at Mass MoCA.

Michael Disfarmer was a portrait photographer in Heber Springs, Ark., who only found fame long after his death. In life, he ran a portrait studio in his hometown, but his existence was anything but peaceful. A rebellion against his farming family and the community at large had him legally change his last name from Meyer, and his reputation was one of gruff eccentricity.

Disfarmer’s photography was marked by sparse settings featuring his subjects in often uncomfortable moments -- not the usual kind of representation people went to a portrait studio for. These images have endured over time, thanks to Disfarmer’s talent for capturing the moments that other photographers-for-hire routinely ignored, or perhaps were not even privy to. There is a psychological darkness, as well as a social awkwardness, to the keepsakes he produced.

The show’s writer and director, Dan Hurlin, first encountered Disfarmer’s work in a bookstore by sheer chance -- he spied a cover that featured a black-and-white photo of two men with their arms around each other and, taken by the image, grabbed it immediately.

"I turned the book over

and looked at the spine, and it just said the word ‘Disfarmer’ and I thought, ‘Well, that’s weird!’ " Hurlin said during an interview this week. "I just picked up the book and found out who he was and started reading it and fell in love."

What most attracted Hurlin to the work was the vivid quality of those who sat for Disfarmer -- never had he encountered images on a page that seemed so alive to him.

"They just seemed like they were going to jump off the page at me, and I couldn’t figure out why for a long time," he said. "I have a theory about it now, but it really took me a long time to understand -- or think I understand -- what was going on in them."

Hurlin came to realize that the allure of the photographs is directly linked to Disfarmer’s demeanor and method of creating, which seem almost designed to capture images of people far outside their comfort zones.

"The guy was not nice," Hurlin said. "When you went in to have your picture made, he would bark at you, and he wouldn’t give you any instruction other than ‘stand there.’ He was unpleasant, and I think people were afraid of him. So when they would stand there, this fight-or-flight instinct took over, and the people in the pictures are just ready to run.

He added, "The other thing is that they’re not fulfilling any kind of fantasy imposed on them by the photographer. He just told them to stand there. He doesn’t tell them even to smile. He doesn’t say turn to the left or to lift up this hand, there’s no interference other than terror."

The abrupt nature of the Disfarmer portrait experience magnified the mystery that was already in place when stepping into a photographers studio.

"Photography at that time was still new in rural Arkansas," Hurlin said, "and so here’s this guy using glass-plate technology -- he goes under a black hood behind this apparatus that they were probably unfamiliar with, and photography was a little exotic at the time. It’s not like everybody has a little Brownie camera or a camera in their cell phone or anything. When you stood for a picture, some of these people really didn’t quite know what was going to happen. They didn’t know what to expect, so they’re just ready for anything."

Part of the challenge for Hurlin in capturing this quality of the work in his own show was to decide where to place his story focus. There was Disfarmer’s personal story itself, but there was also the enormous appeal of the subjects.

"Because they’re so stripped down, they invite narrative," Hurlin said. "You wonder who they are. If you look at a lot of them, you begin to see recurring faces, and you start to fantasize that this person is that person’s brother and this person is going to war. You fill in all of these narrative details. Sometimes there are narrative hints in there. There’s one with a woman who’s holding a paper fan with a Coca Cola advertisement on it. You immediately think about her relationship with glamor at the time. There are these little cues that are peppered throughout the collection."

The subjects of the portraits were the inspiration for Hurlin’s decision to stage the play as a puppet show.

"I like to think of them as cyphers -- blank slates onto which we draw all kinds of conclusions and images," he said, "and that’s exactly why I thought puppetry was the right medium in which to tell the story, because that’s what puppets are as well."

Disfarmer’s story came to a personal end in 1959, after more than three decades of not only plying his somewhat tortured trade, but also living in the photography studio he had built for himself.

"He was found face-down on a pile of papers," Hurlin said. "They hadn’t seen him around town. He had a daily route. He would walk down Main Street, go to the post office, buy a beer at Haywood’s Grocery Store; he would go and bother the mechanic at the auto body shop. He didn’t really have any friends and didn’t really speak to anybody, but for some reason, he would go down to this mechanic’s shop and sit down and talk his ear off, telling unbelievable stories. The mechanic was irritated by it the whole time."

While Disfarmer himself was gone, the story of his work did not stand still, and Hurlin had to wrestle with that aspect of the legend as well. Because Disfarmer had no heirs, the county auctioned his property off -- it was bought for $5 by a photographer who hoped to find some useful equipment. Disfarmer’s glass plates sat in that man’s carport for 20 years, getting very moldy. Then the new local newspaper boss, Peter Miller, found out about them through a photo feature he was running and bought them for $1.

Restoration work began in Rochester, N.Y. -- 4,000 out of 6,000 plates were saved. Recognizing the talent in the photos, Miller sent samples to the editor of American Photographer magazine, Julia Scully, where they sat in a pile for weeks until being opened up. Together, Miller and Scully wrote the first book about Disfarmer and mounted the first retrospective of his work in 1979.

At some point, an art collector sent people down to Heber Springs to buy up all the original Disfarmer prints for $500 apiece. The owners thought they were getting a good deal but had no idea they would end up being worth $10,000 each.

Faced with this narrative sprawl, Hurlin settled on relating Disfarmer’s personal story, as well as his relationship to a disappearing America, utilizing the narrative frame of the last week of the man’s life. In Hurlin’s piece, Disfarmer is played by six puppets that are entirely identical except each is smaller than the other -- during the course of the play, the character shrinks as he moves to the inevitable end.

"A lot of people read that as he’s dying," Hurlin said. "I prefer to think of it as he’s going extinct."

The depiction is related to Hurlin’s own experience growing up in a small town in New Hampshire, which fueled his fascination with rural America as a rapidly disappearing habitat.

"I’m fascinated by how it’s being taken over by the Internet, but it all started with Eisenhower’s highway system," he said. "I just think it’s really interesting, and the fact that every small town in America had a photo studio, and now none of them do -- it’s all Walmarts. The fact that he was working with a medium -- glass plate -- the technology that was already kind of extinct. ... I just began to think of him as someone who was on his way out. He was emblematic of an ongoing extinction."

Disfarmer was both antiquated and modern -- he’s that artsy kid who thumbs his nose defiantly at others in his hometown, complete with the inherent contradictions of a person whose rebellion is defined by and reliant on the presence of that which he rebels against.

The fact that he never left his hometown -- a circumstance of the era he grew up in and his personal psychology -- might be the key ingredient that makes Disfarmer so fascinating.

"The quirk about it is that he never left the town," Hurlin said. "It’s a town that he loathed. He hated it and considered himself much better than it, yet he never set foot outside of it. I find that really fascinating."