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

Who Owns Mike Disfarmer’s Photographs?

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2021-07-19 08:00:07

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.

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