CITY - Issue 60 - (Page 48)

CITY LIFE:Temporary Contemporary Unclean Slate By Bill Powers Making its world premiere at St. Anne’s Warehouse this January is a puppet show about the renowned outsider artist, Mike Disfarmer. N ot many personal details are known about this small-town photog aphe othe than the fact that he made his living taking dime-sto e po t aits of the locals in Hebe Sp ings, kansas and that he so despised his family and thei ag icultu al way of life that he legally changed his su name f om Meye to Disfa me a e his mothe passed. Fo CIT , Bill Powe s spoke with Dan Hu lin, the c eato / di ecto of the play, Disfa me , which will move to the I.C. . in Boston next yea . BP: Is this puppet show a biographical account of his life? DH: We a e concent ating on the last week befo e he died in 1959. Eyewitness epo ts f om that time pe iod suggest that he su vived solely on a diet of bee and chocolate ice c eam. Hebe Sp ings was a d y county so it’s ha d to say whe e he got all his bee , but he did d ink a lot. Do you have permission from the estate to use any of his actual photographs on stage? es, Pete Mille , who somewhat discove ed Disfa me posthumously, owns the copy ight to about one hund ed and ﬁ y pictu es which we will p oject on a backd op du ing one section of the play. What did you learn about Disfarmer in your research? He was ve y much the Boo Radley of his town. I inte viewed one guy who said, “I knew Mike Disfa me my whole life and I couldn’t tell you a thing about him.” He was a lone , a misanth ope. lso, I think of him mo e as a businessman than an a tist. The othe odd thing about him is that he used glass plate technology, which was al eady obsolete by the tu n of the twentieth centu y. So no one had any good anecdotes for you? One ve y lovely, demu e Southe n woman who emembe ed sitting fo Disfa me said of his studio, “It was the kind of place that once you we e in it, you couldn’t wait to get out.” Can you tell us about how the play came to be? The e we e th ee sto ies I had to think about as I developed this p oject: the people in the photos, how these photos ﬁnally came to light and then the sto y of the man himself, which was ultimately my focus. The eason we did it using puppets is because Disfa me was such a ciphe . Nobody knows anything about him so the viewe s a e obliged to ﬁ ll in the blanks. The same is t ue fo Disfa me ’s subjects. We imagine them as mothe and child o husband and wife, but it’s ou own speculative na ation. He is a blank slate, a ciphe as a e puppets. How did Disfarmer ultimately become famous? In the late 1970s, Pete Mille , whom I mentioned ea lie , moved f om New o k to Hebe Sp ings to take ove the local newspape and while he was the e he did a p omotion called “One Day My P ince Will Come,” whe e they asked eade s to send in thei old-timey photos. This guy Joe llb ight esponds to the ad and shows up with boxes and boxes of like 6,000 glass plates. Tu ns out that Joe llb ight had bought the contents of Disfa me ’s studio fo $5 hoping to ﬁ nd some valuable photog aphy equipment, but the e was none. He did, howeve , come upon these glass plates, which then sat in his ca po t fo decades. Pete Mille took an inte est in these pictu es and sent a bunch of them in an unsolicited package to the edito of me ican Photo aphe magazine in New o k, who took one look and booked the next ﬂ ight to Hebe Sp ings. yea late in 1979, the Inte national Cente fo Photog aphy mounted the ﬁ st Mike Disfa me et ospective. The reason we did it using puppets is because Disfarmer was such a cipher. Nobody knows anything about him so the viewers are obliged to fill in the blanks. PHOTO FROM DISFARMER BY BRIAN SELZNICK

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CITY - Issue 60

CITY - Issue 60 Contents Our Friends Action Wanted City Moment In Rogue Luscious Life Temporary Contemporary Fast Food Diary Leona Naess Matthew Stone Henrik V Ibskov Massimiliano Nogioni Young Bloods Keys to the Ferarri Fine Craftsmanship The New Frontier Conscious Evolution New World Order Spiral Casual Fridays Where to Buy It Cityscape

CITY - Issue 60

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