Mike Disfarmer’s Relatives Attain Settlement in Copyright Case Over Photographer’s Work

Relatives of the eccentric photographer Mike Disfarmer have reached a settlement in a copyright dispute involving 1000’s of his pictures and glass-plate negatives.

According to a report by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the main points of the settlement between Disfarmer’s great-great nephew Fred Stewart and the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts are confidential. The museum holds most of the photographer’s surviving negatives.

“The Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts and the Disfarmer family have reached a mutual agreement,” Stewart says in an announcement. “I have met several representatives of the AMOFA and found them very pleasant and professional.”

The New York Times reported final week that whereas the particular phrases are personal, the settlement seems to go away the heirs in possession of the copyright and about 3,000 of Disfarmer’s glass-plate negatives, together with a whole lot of posthumous prints constructed from them.

According to the information outlet, the primary family-authorized exhibition of the photographer’s work opened on February 25. Titled “Disfarmer: The Homecoming,” the show options 9 prints and is on view within the rotunda of the Arkansas State Capitol by means of late May.

Stewart filed a lawsuit in opposition to the museum’s basis in 2024, alleging it had been profiting illegally from 1000’s of Disfarmer pictures and glass-plate negatives that had been donated to the establishment within the mid-Seventies.

Disfarmer died in 1959, however his portraits of residents of rural Arkansas had been rediscovered by the artwork pictures world within the Seventies. Since then, his photographs of extraordinary individuals have come to represent small-town America in the course of the Great Depression and World War II.

Working primarily in black and white, Disfarmer photographed members of his group within the city of Heber Springs. Beginning round 1914, Disfarmer photographed native residents who bought portraits for as little as 25 cents. His topics sometimes stood stiffly in a naked studio setting, usually dealing with the digital camera with little expression. The stark simplicity of those portraits has usually been in comparison with the temper of American Gothic by Grant Wood.

Disfarmer himself stays a considerably mysterious determine. Born Mike Meyer in Indiana, he legally modified his title in 1939 to Mike Disfarmer. According to a submitting from basis attorneys, he believed that “Meyer” meant farmer in German and adopted the title “Disfarmer,” which he interpreted to imply “not a farmer.” He additionally reportedly claimed that when he was three years outdated he had been blown by a twister into the house of a pair named Meyer. Disfarmer moved to Heber Springs, by no means married, and lived alone in his pictures studio. He was usually described as eccentric.

When he died at 75, Disfarmer left behind 1000’s of glass-plate negatives and a checking account containing $18,148.80, which was divided amongst his siblings or their heirs. According to court docket filings from the museum basis’s attorneys, members of the family confirmed little curiosity within the negatives on the time. They had been offered at an property sale for $5 to former Heber Springs mayor Joe Allbright.

Allbright later offered the gathering in 1973 to Peter Miller, editor of the Arkansas Sun. Miller mentioned in a 2021 interview that he acquired about 6,000 glass-plate negatives. Many of the plates had been saved in Allbright’s storage for greater than a decade, the place micro organism had begun to destroy the animal-gelatin emulsion used within the negatives.

Miller traveled to the headquarters of Kodak in Rochester, New York, to discover ways to salvage the remaining plates. Restoring them was a arduous years-long course of. In 1976, Miller transferred the negatives to an entity often called The Group Inc., which later gave them to the Arkansas Arts Center, now often called the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts.

Image credit: Photographs by Mike Disfarmer