Artists & Projects Directory

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• Dan Hurlin
• David Roussève/REALITY
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• Ralph Lemon
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• The America Project
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Dan Hurlin

Usually I start with some intriguing scrap from the pages of history - the more obscure or forgotten, the better: the birth of the Dionne Quintuplets; the 1859 unveiling of Frederic Edwin Church's painting The Heart of the Andes; the visit of the Hiroshima Maidens to New York City. I research the subject extensively, looking for a personal connection to the past, a way in to all this history and culture we've collectively accumulated so far. I have always been drawn to stories from and about rural America. Perhaps as a means of investigating my relationship to my own history, having grown up in a small town in southern New Hampshire. So my attraction to the life and work of a nearly forgotten, Arkansas portrait photographer is a natural.

Being introduced to Mike Disfarmer's photographs and learning his enigmatic history, I felt compelled to decode both the images and the man who made them. How did Disfarmer, who was by all accounts the town "Boo Radley," manage to get his subjects to lower their guard for him so completely? How could this misanthropic outcast live his life resenting the rural isolation of Heber Springs, Arkansas, without ever making an attempt to break away? While the subjects in Disfarmer's portraits are (or were) real people with real lives, for contemporary viewers they are ciphers - repositories for our own daydreams and ruminations. "She is her sister," we might think. "He is about to go off to War," "They are lovers," "That marriage is over."

Puppets are also blank slates, inanimate objects whose inner lives are supplied by the insistence of the audience's imagination. This shared quality is what convinced me that puppetry was the appropriate medium to use in telling the story of Mike Disfarmer and his pictures. The small town portrait photographer is a dying breed, and the body of Disfarmer's work documents the vanishing world of rural America with astounding clarity. It has been suggested that, in some ways, Disfarmer was less an artist than a kind of scientist who pinned his subjects to a black backdrop like specimen butterflies. Puppetry is a medium that, while shrinking the subject to less than human size, magnifies their actions. I am putting Disfarmer and his photographs under the same intense scrutiny that he used on his family and neighbors, to understand and perhaps to even empathize with his photographs as deeply personal expressions of their time and place.