April 14 – May 27, 2001

Mike Disfarmer
Portraits from Arkansas


Photo by Mike Disfarmer, collection of Arkansas Arts Center

Curated by Denis Gautier.

Mike Disfarmer, born Michael Meyer, documented Depression era and wartime American rural life in Heber Springs, Arkansas. In a spare studio, using an unceremonious approach, Disfarmer created a body of portraits which are honest and unpretentious. In a time and place where few owned cameras and family was valued above all, Disfarmer captured the range of personalities living in Heber Springs. He shares their lives through images; young and old, women and men innocently wearing their pride and affections. Disfarmer's portraits of this rural community, reveal a shared bond rarely seen in contemporary society.

Taking his subjects as they presented themselves, and using a plain studio wall as his background, Mike Disfarmer made a wonderful, selfless record of a time, place and people that look something like the family values America that politicians keep fantasizing about. . . .the inclusion of many images not seen before settles the lingering issue of whether Disfarmer's talent depends on skillful post hoc editing. It doesn't: Disfarmer is the real thing, and no other rediscovered photographer of the last quarter-century--excepting E.J. Bellocq--comes close to equaling his naive genius.

(Andy Grundberg, New York Times Book Review)

Works in the exhibition on loan from the Arkansas Arts Center.

Curated by Denis Gautier.

A studio photographer working in the fifties in Bamako in Mali, South of the Sahara in Africa, Seydou Keïta made tens of thousands of portraits of his community from 1948 to 1962. Together they form an outstanding record of Malian Society during this period. Seydou Keïta’s portraits were first shown internationally in a group exhibition at the centre for African art in New York in 1991, and have since been presented and admired in many countries. Scalo Zurich-Berlin-New York published his portraits in a large, beautiful monograph, in 1997.

“When you are a photographer, you always have to come up with ideas to please the customer… You try to obtain the best pose, the most advantageous profile, because photography is an art, everything should be as close to perfection as possible…. In Bamako we say “i ka nyè tan”, which in English means “you look beautiful like that”. Art is beauty.” (Keïta)

Works in the exhibition on loan from Wedge Gallery and Stephen Bulger Gallery in Toronto; CAAC - The Pigozzi Collection (Geneva) with the assistance of Andre Magnin and Philippe Boutté; and several private collections.