In the small mountain town of Heber Springs, the Arkansas artist known as Disfarmer captured the lives and emotions of the people of rural America between 1939-1945. Critics have hailed Disfarmer's remarkable black and white portraits as "a work of artistic genius" and "a classical episode in the history of American photography." ?The Disfarmer pictures are startling experiences; their subjects come out to us with the vividness and clarity of unaltered realty itself. We must wonder at the art and craft and purpose that produced such a gallery of provincial characters unforgettable in their intense inwardness and vulnerability, etched with the urgency which gives the Disfarmer pictures their aura of inscrutable drama. A distillation of an acerbic, perhaps tragic view of life with something quirky, homespun, and deeply intuitive, it's the art of Disfarmer that puts him in touch with time and place, that gives his portraits their power as singular and hence visionary documents.? -