Industrious and conservative, the Group distanced itself from the free-love ethos of the era, leading local Boy and Girl Scout troops and establishing several reputable businesses, including a family-friendly dinner theatre. Still, as outsiders in an insular rural community, they became targets of animosity. After Group members voted as a bloc in a contentious local election, night riders from an opposing side vandalized their compound, throwing stones and firing rifles. In 1973, in an attempt to build good will, the Group founded a newspaper, the Arkansas Sun, which ran doting items on regional history and a photo-identification contest featuring old snapshots submitted by readers.
One morning, a Group member who edited the paper, Peter Miller, got a call from a former mayor of the town of Heber Springs, offering him a hoard of historical images. It was the lifework of Mike Disfarmer, a photographer who'd operated a portrait studio during the first half of the twentieth century, charging clients two quarters for a trio of postcard-size prints. Disfarmer never married or had children, and he died, in 1959, without leaving a will. His studio, on Heber Springs's main drag, sat vacant for two years. When it was scheduled to be levelled, to make way for a new Piggly Wiggly, the former mayor paid the local bank a token sum of five dollars to acquire Disfarmer's belongings, including hundreds of slender cardboard boxes that contained his original glass-plate negatives. The plates had been moldering in the mayor's garage for more than a decade.
Miller, a native New Yorker with a background in photography, paid a few bucks for the entire lot. In school, at the University of Iowa, he'd heard a cautionary tale of a man who'd soaked a trove of old negatives in Clorox and used the glass to build a greenhouse. "It was like taking a Rembrandt and scraping the picture off to use the canvas for a shirt," Miller told me recently. He felt an "artistic responsibility" to salvage Disfarmer's archive, but he wasn't sure how to clean the plates, so he sent one, with a request for instructions, to the Kodak research laboratory, in Rochester, New York. Then, in a darkroom in his home, he worked to restore and develop the negatives. He also began publishing the portraits in the Sun's photo-identification contest. Readers who could identify a Disfarmer subject as their relative received a glossy copy of the image free of charge. A portrait of Ed and Mamie Barger, a married pair of farmers, was identified by twenty-five of their kin, and Miller sent off as many prints.
In Disfarmer's time, customers visited the portrait studio to commemorate first birthdays and anniversaries, Army furloughs and family reunions. Yet his style was bracingly solemn, even gothic. His subjects, mostly country folk and seemingly all white, posed against plain backdrops with their own props: an ice-cream cone, a football helmet, a fishing rod. In a now famous portrait, from 1943, a father and son in hunting garb eye the camera from behind the enormous carcass of an antlered buck. To jolt subjects out of practiced poses, Disfarmer sometimes fired a flash or clanged a cowbell. The resulting portraits were far odder and more intimate than the average family snapshot. In 1974, Miller mailed a selection of his favorite prints to Julia Scully, the editor of Modern Photography, a magazine in New York. In a submission letter, he acknowledged that some of Disfarmer's images were "technically quite imperfect," with a shallow depth of field and uneven lighting. But Miller praised how "the people of Arkansas" seemed to bare their souls for Disfarmer's camera "in an honest and straightforward way." Scully was so taken with the images that she teamed up with Miller to search for a book publisher. "The subjects stared out at me with such directness, such a lack of pretense, that it seemed as if there was no intervening presence," she later wrote.
A father and son in hunting garb eye the camera from behind the enormous carcass of an antlered buck
In the studio, Disfarmer sometimes fired a flash or clanged a cowbell to jolt his subjects out of their practiced poses.
Their book, "Disfarmer: The Heber Springs Portraits," released in 1976, by Addison House, and accompanied by an exhibition at the International Center of Photography, in New York, turned the small-town photographer into a sudden cause célèbre in the photo world. A review in the Times declared that Disfarmer could "stand comparison" with August Sander, Diane Arbus, and Irving Penn. Richard Avedon called the book "indispensable." Sarah Meister, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art from 2009 to 2021, acquired a number of Disfarmers that hang in the Picturing America gallery, alongside works by Walker Evans and Edward Weston. Meister, who is now the executive director of the Aperture Foundation, told me that it's hard to know whether Disfarmer even considered his photos to be works of art. Regardless, she added, "I think he is among the great portraitists of the twentieth century."
After discovering Disfarmer's negatives, Miller went on to establish a career as one of Arkansas's leading personal-injury lawyers, with full-page ads on the back of the Little Rock phone book and a jingle on local TV. ("The man with the smile is the way to go / Call 3-7-4 6-3-0-0.") But he remained the de-facto guardian of Disfarmer's legacy, and the Group, which pooled its members' earnings, became a prime beneficiary. In the seventies, Miller and the Group donated a large portion of the negatives to the Arkansas Arts Center Foundation (now the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts Foundation), with an agreement to split any revenue generated from reproductions of the work. Later, under the representation of Howard Greenberg Gallery, in New York, Miller sold numbered editions of Disfarmer prints. (So did Julia Scully, who'd happened on a much smaller batch of negatives at a thrift store in Heber Springs.)
Miller left the Group in 2012 and eventually retired, with his wife, to Columbia, South Carolina. Now seventy-eight, with deep dimples and a silver goatee, he spends his free time playing jazz guitar in an amateur band at the local university. On a video call this spring, he spoke from the music room of his suburban home, wearing a dress shirt and suspenders, and seemed more eager to show off a wooden chair he'd built than to discuss his work preserving Disfarmer's portraits. "It was a labor of love," he told me, "but it wasn't the greatest thing I ever did." Until recently, he'd considered it a closed chapter of his life.
That changed in 2019, when, on a family trip to New York, Miller stopped by Howard Greenberg Gallery and learned that it had recently received a letter challenging the sale of Disfarmer prints. The author of the letter was David Deal, a lawyer who'd made his name leading a previous dispute over the estate of another Howard Greenberg artist, the photographer Vivian Maier. Maier, a nanny in Chicago, made no known attempts to sell or exhibit her work during her lifetime. Like Disfarmer, she became famous after her death. In 2014, Deal tracked down one of Maier's distant cousins to fight for control of her archive. (A high-profile copyright-infringement case against one of the major collectors of her work was settled, confidentially, in 2016.) Now, as Deal's letter informed Howard Greenberg, he was representing Disfarmer's heirs—not one or two but nearly three dozen—in an effort to recover their "physical and intellectual property" and "any revenue generated by the appropriation" of copyrighted images. "He's suing us," a gallery associate told Miller. "And he's gonna sue you."
The group of relatives fighting for control of Disfarmer's estate, including Ruth Kirkemier, one of Disfarmer's great-nieces, is now about sixty strong.Photograph by Rachel Boillot for The New Yorker
For a long time, American copyright law contained what one legal scholar described to me as a "trap for unsophisticated artists." Once published, art works automatically entered the public domain unless they were labelled with a © or registered with the U.S. Copyright Office. If artists weren't aware of these requirements, they unwittingly relinquished legal control of their creations. In 1976, an overhaul of the Copyright Act enshrined stronger protections. Today, artists generally receive copyrights to their works by default; after they die, the protections pass to their heirs for seventy years. During that period, whether you've purchased a negative for pennies at an estate sale or a print for millions at Christie's, simply owning a physical image does not entitle you to reproduce it in any form.
In practice, though, photographs remain highly susceptible to copyright infringement—especially in the digital age, when images can be captured and circulated with just a few clicks. "The general public feels much more comfortable taking liberties with the copyrights of photographs, as opposed to the copyrights of songs or sculptures or paintings," Deal told me recently, from his law office in Charlottesville, Virginia. "It's very easy to say, 'Oh, it's just a photo—I found it online.' " Fifty-one years old, with a shaved head and an athletic build, Deal began his career as a professional photographer. He made the switch to copyright law, a decade ago, because he'd seen his own work reproduced without his permission, including once on a highway billboard. Up to a certain point, he acknowledged, the loose standards can benefit artists. Both Vivian Maier's and Mike Disfarmer's work first attracted attention because collectors took it upon themselves to make and publish prints. The problem is that, when their art gained worldwide acclaim, the wrong parties profited from it. "Until recently, there was almost no pushback against people who just kind of declared themselves the curators and administrators of found work," Deal said.
One of the first collectors of Maier's photography, Ron Slattery, was the catalyst for the Disfarmer dispute. A burly, ponytailed specialist in mid-twentieth-century vernacular photography, he'd built a following in the early two-thousands as a blogger, sharing images found at flea markets and estate sales under the heading "Accidental Art." In 2007, at a secondhand auction in Chicago, Slattery and several other bidders bought up the vast majority of Maier's photographs, which a nearby storage facility had relinquished after Maier stopped paying rent on her unit. Dumbstruck by the quality of Maier's work, Slattery posted some of her images on his blog and resold a few others. But he wasn't one of the collectors who were sued when Maier's heir came forward, after her death, because his own lawyer had persuaded him never to make prints. "He told me, 'Get out your forty-five and put it in your mouth, because that's what you'd be doing,' " Slattery recalled.
After the Maier case, Slattery couldn't help noticing other famous photography being circulated by individuals who didn't seem like the artists' legal heirs. In 2019, during a photo-hunting road trip, he and his now wife, a fellow-collector named Fawn, started looking into Disfarmer. Self-described "photo ninjas," they saw that copyrights for most of his images were attributed to Peter Miller and the Group, and that biographical accounts tended to portray Disfarmer as a recluse without family ties. Born Michael Meyer, to German-American farmers, Disfarmer had changed his name in his fifties, tacking a negative prefix onto the family trade, and he liked to say that a tornado had blown him away from his real home at birth. To the Slatterys, this narrative seemed like spin, designed to distance Disfarmer from the relatives who were his rightful beneficiaries. "It was all the same story—he was mean, he was a drunk, he was crazy," Fawn told me, from the couple's home, in Ontario, adding that art dealers had portrayed Vivian Maier in a similar fashion. "They bring these people down so that they can take their art and use it however they want."