"The Lesser Intimacies: On the Touch of Meaning in the Photogrphy of Mike Disfarmer"
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- Date/Time
- 04/02/2014 5:30 PM EST - 7:30 PM EST
- Location
- Baron & Ellin Gordon Art Galleries
- Fee
- Free
- Description
- This is a presentation by Dr. Colin Johnson of Indiana University. Mike Disfarmer (born Mike Meyer) was a commercial portrait photographer who lived and worked in the small town of Heber Springs, Arkansas, between about 1915 and the time of his death in 1959. Professionally active during the 1940s especially, Disfarmer was virtually unknown to the wider world during his lifetime. In 1974, however, his work was “discovered” by photographer Peter Miller when Joe Albright, a retired Army engineer and Heber Springs local, drew Miller’s attention to a trove of more than 3000 glass plate negatives he had removed from Disfarmer’s long-since abandoned studio just before the building was unceremoniously raised to the ground in order to clear the way for “progress” in the form of a new parking lot at the nearby Piggly Wiggly grocery store. Following his posthumous rediscovery, Disfarmer gained considerable notoriety among critics and collectors, many of whom now regard him as one of the most important American photographers of the twentieth century. Disfarmer’s photographs are remarkable in many ways, including the fact that some depict same-sex couples expressing physical affection through touch: women embrace one another lovingly; men sit atop another’s laps, or gently hold hands. This talk considers the meaning of such intimate gestures in Disfarmer’s photography, as well as the significance of non-sexual intimacies generally to our understanding of the queer past.
