Book blurb:

Over the last two decades Disfarmer’s portraits have been exhibited in galleries across the United States and Europe. Yet to date he is known by relatively few images, primarily those published in the original book, which is now long out of print. The existing archive of his negatives numbers in the thousands, however. Puzzlingly, almost all of the recovered negatives appear to date from the short time span between 1939 and 1946.

Of the 4,200 negatives Allbright gave to Miller, approximately 3,000 were salvageable. The rest were so damaged by water and bacteria, which had destroyed the emulsion, that they had to be discarded. With the aid of a grant from the Levi Strauss Foundation, Miller spent some six months cleaning and cataloguing the remaining negatives. He then transferred the bulk of the Disfarmer collection to the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock, retaining approximately 300 negatives in his personal holdings. My own collection, found in a second hand shop near Heber Springs in 1974, numbers about 400. This publication of almost 180 of Disfarmer’s images, drawn from all three sources, adds significantly to the work already known.