Most painters I know consider photography a boring cousin of painting. But almost all of us — painters and non-painters alike — snap to attention when we encounter the work of a great photographer such as Mike Disfarmer — a name that, even among artists, rings almost no bells.

Mike Disfarmer died in 1959 at the age of 75. For almost fifty years, he had made his living by taking portraits of regular, small-town folk in Heber Springs, Arkansas, but it wasn’t until the early ’70s that photography aficionados began to acknowledge his genius. Today, Disfarmer is ranked alongside Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, and Diane Arbus, and his work is in major photography collections such as those of the Met, MOMA, the Getty, and the ICP.

An exhibition at the Steven Kasher Gallery in New York — “Disfarmer: Women” (through 10 February 2008) — is the first exhibition of Disfarmer’s work to focus exclusively on his portraits of women. Each of the 50 vintage prints in this show — dating mostly from the ’40s and ’50s — is a formal portrait of a woman or group of women coiffed and dressed for the very special occasion of sitting for a portrait.

As an adult, Disfarmer was eccentric, if not a little crazy. The son of German immigrants, he legally changed his name from Meyer (German for “farmer”) to the odd and silly name “Disfarmer” — thereby asserting that he was not a farmer. He once said that a tornado had dropped him down with his family. He seems to have gone out of his way to be difficult and cantankerous — a dumb move for someone wanting to do business in a small town.

Disfarmer first set up shop as a full-time portrait photographer in the early 1930s. It wasn’t unusual back then for small towns to have professional portrait photographers, but why this difficult, unlikable man attracted just about everybody and his sister to his studio to have their picture taken is hard to explain. From all accounts, he was grumpy during what were very long sittings, exceedingly persnickety about such things as the lighting, and very arrogant about his talent.

The subjects in Disfarmer’s portraits put up with these things, perhaps because they sensed they were confronting a genuine artist and not just another hack. Although Disfarmer was gruff when he worked, his results — with women, anyway — were generous and forgiving. His women hold demure poses and make awkward attempts to please while in front of the camera without losing even one ounce of their dignity.

Disfarmer’s women are frequently not very pretty, and seem to present themselves to us a little apologetically. It’s as if they don’t quite believe they warrant a formal portrait. By today’s standards, they seem restrained. Even when they vamp in front of the camera, they have a degree of modesty that’s almost entirely lacking in women today.

In making an occasion of their portraits — by dressing up to look as nice as they could — Disfarmer’s women give themselves to the world at their considered best. Knowing nothing of breast implants, botox injections, tummy tucks and all the rest of the desperate grasps at youth and beauty we today accept as an almost normal part of primping, their measure of themselves was kinder and gentler than ours. Disfarmer’s women practiced an art that is fast disappearing from our world — knowing how to make the most out of the hand that nature dealt.

Photo courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery