- Mike Disfarmer (1884-1959) is a true American eccentric. Born Mike Meyer, he changed his name to distance himself from both the surrounding farming community of his native Arkansas and from his own kinfolk - claiming that a tornado had accidentally blown him onto the Meyer family farm as a baby. The son of a German-born Union soldier in the heart of the South, Disfarmer was an agnostic from Lutheran stock among the church-going Baptists and Methodists, and remained a confirmed bachelor in a community of large families. - Despite his outsider status, as the resident studio photographer in the tiny town of Heber Springs from 1917-1956, Disfarmer was the ultimate insider, privy to each family's rites of passage -from first birthdays to high-school graduations, from engagements to anniversaries, from army furloughs to funerals. His studio portraits present the people of the heartland during the turbulent times of the early twentieth century. Disfarmer documented the farm families as they sent their sons to fight World War I, struggled through the Great Depression and returned to battle for World War II. His career concludes with the optimistic 1950s, as his previously somber camera joyfully captures the pairings of bobby-soxed young women and their James Dean-wannabe boyfriends. 'Becoming Disfarmer' uses a compelling sequence of over 100 images to tell the story of Mike Disfarmer's vernacular portraiture and its transformation into art. This monograph features his vintage prints along with a selection of enlargements made from his negatives in the 1970s, through which his work first became known. - Fine copy