Disfarmer: i ritratti di Heber Springs, 1939 – 1946

SpazioFoto presents The Heber Springs portraits made by the studio photographer Disfarmer (1888-1959) in rural America in the 30s and 40s.
Celebrated as one of the most significant bodies of work in the history of portraiture, Disfarmer’s photographs are included in the permanent collections of the New York Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Arkansas Art Center, and the International Center of Photography in New York. Disfarmer’s work has also been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout Europe and the United States.
Disfarmer was one of thousands of small studio owners in the US who offered an important service to the people they lived among. The majority of his photographs revolve around family: the need to record a growing infant or a newborn baby, to capture the relationship between sisters or the longevity of a marriage. Yet, they also have a more universal meaning constructing, as they do, a picture of life in the Depression.
Disfarmer’s subjects look into the camera with an enormous amount of self-possession. They are ordinary people with clothes carefully pressed for the important encounter with the photographer, standing straight for the camera, or sitting in carefully arranged groups. For them, the making of a portrait was an important act, bound up with notions of community and sense of place. Disfarmer did not try to change his subjects into what they were not; he acknowledged their simplicity and solemnity and expressed it with the plainness and dignity of his work.
The exhibition has been produced by the Hasselblad Center in Gˆteborg.
It consists of a hundred 40X50 cm black and white prints and 10 50X60cm prints selected by Martino Marangoni.
Disfarmer is exclusively represented by the Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.