Who Owns Mike Disfarmer’s Photographs?

In the nineteen-sixties, a choir of young folk musicians started a commune called the Group, Inc., and settled in the foothills of the Arkansas Ozarks. Industrious and conservative, the Group distanced itself from the free-love ethos of the era, leading local Boy and Girl Scout troops and establishing several reputable businesses, including a family-friendly dinner theatre. Still, as outsiders in an insular rural community, they became targets of animosity. After Group members voted as a bloc in a contentious local election, night riders from an opposing side vandalized their compound, throwing stones and firing rifles. In 1973, in an attempt to build good will, the Group founded a newspaper, the Arkansas Sun, which ran doting items on regional history and a photo-identification contest featuring old snapshots submitted by readers.

One morning, a Group member who edited the paper, Peter Miller, got a call from a former mayor of the town of Heber Springs, offering him a hoard of historical images. It was the lifework of Mike Disfarmer, a photographer who’d operated a portrait studio during the first half of the twentieth century, charging clients two quarters for a trio of postcard-size prints. Disfarmer never married or had children, and he died, in 1959, without leaving a will. His studio, on Heber Springs’s main drag, sat vacant for two years. When it was scheduled to be levelled, to make way for a new Piggly Wiggly, the former mayor paid the local bank a token sum of five dollars to acquire Disfarmer’s belongings, including hundreds of slender cardboard boxes that contained his original glass-plate negatives. The plates had been moldering in the mayor’s garage for more than a decade.

Miller, a native New Yorker with a background in photography, paid a few bucks for the entire lot. In school, at the University of Iowa, he’d heard a cautionary tale of a man who’d soaked a trove of old negatives in Clorox and used the glass to build a greenhouse. “It was like taking a Rembrandt and scraping the picture off to use the canvas for a shirt,” Miller told me recently. He felt an “artistic responsibility” to salvage Disfarmer’s archive, but he wasn’t sure how to clean the plates, so he sent one, with a request for instructions, to the Kodak research laboratory, in Rochester, New York. Then, in a darkroom in his home, he worked to restore and develop the negatives. He also began publishing the portraits in the Sun’s photo-identification contest. Readers who could identify a Disfarmer subject as their relative received a glossy copy of the image free of charge. A portrait of Ed and Mamie Barger, a married pair of farmers, was identified by twenty-five of their kin, and Miller sent off as many prints.

In Disfarmer’s time, customers visited the portrait studio to commemorate first birthdays and anniversaries, Army furloughs and family reunions. Yet his style was bracingly solemn, even gothic. His subjects, mostly country folk and seemingly all white, posed against plain backdrops with their own props: an ice-cream cone, a football helmet, a fishing rod. In a now famous portrait, from 1943, a father and son in hunting garb eye the camera from behind the enormous carcass of an antlered buck. To jolt subjects out of practiced poses, Disfarmer sometimes fired a flash or clanged a cowbell. The resulting portraits were far odder and more intimate than the average family snapshot. In 1974, Miller mailed a selection of his favorite prints to Julia Scully, the editor of Modern Photography, a magazine in New York. In a submission letter, he acknowledged that some of Disfarmer’s images were “technically quite imperfect,” with a shallow depth of field and uneven lighting. But Miller praised how “the people of Arkansas” seemed to bare their souls for Disfarmer’s camera “in an honest and straightforward way.” Scully was so taken with the images that she teamed up with Miller to search for a book publisher. “The subjects stared out at me with such directness, such a lack of pretense, that it seemed as if there was no intervening presence,” she later wrote.

Their book, “Disfarmer: The Heber Springs Portraits,” released in 1976, by Addison House, and accompanied by an exhibition at the International Center of Photography, in New York, turned the small-town photographer into a sudden cause célèbre in the photo world. A review in the Times declared that Disfarmer could “stand comparison” with August Sander, Diane Arbus, and Irving Penn. Richard Avedon called the book “indispensable.” Sarah Meister, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art from 2009 to 2021, acquired a number of Disfarmers that hang in the Picturing America gallery, alongside works by Walker Evans and Edward Weston. Meister, who is now the executive director of the Aperture Foundation, told me that it’s hard to know whether Disfarmer even considered his photos to be works of art. Regardless, she added, “I think he is among the great portraitists of the twentieth century.”

After discovering Disfarmer’s negatives, Miller went on to establish a career as one of Arkansas’s leading personal-injury lawyers, with full-page ads on the back of the Little Rock phone book and a jingle on local TV. (“The man with the smile is the way to go / Call 3-7-4 6-3-0-0.”) But he remained the de-facto guardian of Disfarmer’s legacy, and the Group, which pooled its members’ earnings, became a prime beneficiary. In the seventies, Miller and the Group donated a large portion of the negatives to the Arkansas Arts Center Foundation (now the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts Foundation), with an agreement to split any revenue generated from reproductions of the work. Later, under the representation of Howard Greenberg Gallery, in New York, Miller sold numbered editions of Disfarmer prints. (So did Julia Scully, who’d happened on a much smaller batch of negatives at a thrift store in Heber Springs.)

Miller left the Group in 2012 and eventually retired, with his wife, to Columbia, South Carolina. Now seventy-eight, with deep dimples and a silver goatee, he spends his free time playing jazz guitar in an amateur band at the local university. On a video call this spring, he spoke from the music room of his suburban home, wearing a dress shirt and suspenders, and seemed more eager to show off a wooden chair he’d built than to discuss his work preserving Disfarmer’s portraits. “It was a labor of love,” he told me, “but it wasn’t the greatest thing I ever did.” Until recently, he’d considered it a closed chapter of his life.

That changed in 2019, when, on a family trip to New York, Miller stopped by Howard Greenberg Gallery and learned that it had recently received a letter challenging the sale of Disfarmer prints. The author of the letter was David Deal, a lawyer who’d made his name leading a previous dispute over the estate of another Howard Greenberg artist, the photographer Vivian Maier. Maier, a nanny in Chicago, made no known attempts to sell or exhibit her work during her lifetime. Like Disfarmer, she became famous after her death. In 2014, Deal tracked down one of Maier’s distant cousins to fight for control of her archive. (A high-profile copyright-infringement case against one of the major collectors of her work was settled, confidentially, in 2016.) Now, as Deal’s letter informed Howard Greenberg, he was representing Disfarmer’s heirs—not one or two but nearly three dozen—in an effort to recover their “physical and intellectual property” and “any revenue generated by the appropriation” of copyrighted images. “He’s suing us,” a gallery associate told Miller. “And he’s gonna sue you.”

For a long time, American copyright law contained what one legal scholar described to me as a “trap for unsophisticated artists.” Once published, art works automatically entered the public domain unless they were labelled with a © or registered with the U.S. Copyright Office. If artists weren’t aware of these requirements, they unwittingly relinquished legal control of their creations. In 1976, an overhaul of the Copyright Act enshrined stronger protections. Today, artists generally receive copyrights to their works by default; after they die, the protections pass to their heirs for seventy years. During that period, whether you’ve purchased a negative for pennies at an estate sale or a print for millions at Christie’s, simply owning a physical image does not entitle you to reproduce it in any form.

In practice, though, photographs remain highly susceptible to copyright infringement—especially in the digital age, when images can be captured and circulated with just a few clicks. “The general public feels much more comfortable taking liberties with the copyrights of photographs, as opposed to the copyrights of songs or sculptures or paintings,” Deal told me recently, from his law office in Charlottesville, Virginia. “It’s very easy to say, ‘Oh, it’s just a photo—I found it online.’ ” Fifty-one years old, with a shaved head and an athletic build, Deal began his career as a professional photographer. He made the switch to copyright law, a decade ago, because he’d seen his own work reproduced without his permission, including once on a highway billboard. Up to a certain point, he acknowledged, the loose standards can benefit artists. Both Vivian Maier’s and Mike Disfarmer’s work first attracted attention because collectors took it upon themselves to make and publish prints. The problem is that, when their art gained worldwide acclaim, the wrong parties profited from it. “Until recently, there was almost no pushback against people who just kind of declared themselves the curators and administrators of found work,” Deal said.

One of the first collectors of Maier’s photography, Ron Slattery, was the catalyst for the Disfarmer dispute. A burly, ponytailed specialist in mid-twentieth-century vernacular photography, he’d built a following in the early two-thousands as a blogger, sharing images found at flea markets and estate sales under the heading “Accidental Art.” In 2007, at a secondhand auction in Chicago, Slattery and several other bidders bought up the vast majority of Maier’s photographs, which a nearby storage facility had relinquished after Maier stopped paying rent on her unit. Dumbstruck by the quality of Maier’s work, Slattery posted some of her images on his blog and resold a few others. But he wasn’t one of the collectors who were sued when Maier’s heir came forward, after her death, because his own lawyer had persuaded him never to make prints. “He told me, ‘Get out your forty-five and put it in your mouth, because that’s what you’d be doing,’ ” Slattery recalled.

After the Maier case, Slattery couldn’t help noticing other famous photography being circulated by individuals who didn’t seem like the artists’ legal heirs. In 2019, during a photo-hunting road trip, he and his now wife, a fellow-collector named Fawn, started looking into Disfarmer. Self-described “photo ninjas,” they saw that copyrights for most of his images were attributed to Peter Miller and the Group, and that biographical accounts tended to portray Disfarmer as a recluse without family ties. Born Michael Meyer, to German-American farmers, Disfarmer had changed his name in his fifties, tacking a negative prefix onto the family trade, and he liked to say that a tornado had blown him away from his real home at birth. To the Slatterys, this narrative seemed like spin, designed to distance Disfarmer from the relatives who were his rightful beneficiaries. “It was all the same story—he was mean, he was a drunk, he was crazy,” Fawn told me, from the couple’s home, in Ontario, adding that art dealers had portrayed Vivian Maier in a similar fashion. “They bring these people down so that they can take their art and use it however they want.”

Fawn, who has a soft voice and long red hair, specializes in what’s known as postmortem photography: selections from coroners’ albums, daguerreotypes of lifeless Victorian babies. Almost all of her macabre collection is old enough to be safely in the public domain, and she found it “dirty” that strangers could assume control of an artist’s legacy without a legal right to it. With a bit of sleuthing, she discovered that Disfarmer had numerous living relatives—the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of his six siblings—and that the majority of them still lived in Arkansas. The Slatterys travelled there and, at the courthouse in Heber Springs, determined that those relatives were Disfarmer’s legal heirs. With the help of David Deal, who was an acquaintance from the Maier case, they learned that the glass-plate negatives might be part of the family’s inheritance. Even if that couldn’t be proved, Disfarmer’s relatives might have a claim to the work’s copyrights, which would empower them to stop unauthorized reproductions. Like “Amway salesmen,” Ron told me, the Slatterys started knocking on the relatives’ doors, hoping to notify as many of them as possible.

On a warm night in September of 2019, they met Fred Stewart and his mother, Ellen, Disfarmer’s great-niece, who live in adjacent log homes outside the Little Rock city limits. Ellen, a petite woman in her eighties, had memories of taking family trips to visit “Uncle Mike” at his studio. Hanging on the wall of her bedroom was a Disfarmer portrait of her parents on their wedding day. In the image, her mother stands unsmiling in a fur-collared black coat that covers all but the hem of her white gown. Growing up, Stewart would joke that his grandparents looked oddly glum for a pair of newlyweds. Now the Slatterys were saying that similar images had sold for more than twenty thousand dollars in New York.

At first, Stewart told me, “I thought the whole thing was a scam.” But, as he paged through old Disfarmer portraits in his mother’s collection, he thought they looked familiar. He’d seen similar images at a riverside art exhibition in downtown Little Rock. Later, he learned that his son had studied Disfarmer in a photography course, at the University of Arkansas, without knowing that there was any relation. On Facebook, Stewart corresponded with other distant relatives who’d heard from the Slatterys; most of them had known nothing of Disfarmer’s renown either. Within several months, they had banded together to fight for control of his estate, with Stewart as their appointed leader and Deal as their attorney. The Slatterys presented their involvement as a passion project, but Deal told me that he and the couple had privately arranged to split any attorney’s fees. (The Slatterys told me that they planned to use any earnings to help the family re-create the Disfarmer studio.)

Like many of Disfarmer’s relatives, Stewart had grown up poor, on a soybean-and-rice farm. As a teen-ager, he’d worn secondhand clothes and taped up old pairs of sneakers to save money for community college. “What really got to me was the thought of other people benefitting from our family, and the thought that they didn’t care,” he said. Disfarmer’s path to posthumous fame seemed to rely on a galling irony: art collectors had celebrated his portraits of modest Arkansans without sparing a thought for his modest Arkansan heirs.

One gray morning, in March, I drove with Stewart and his older sister, Sherry Atkins, from Little Rock to Heber Springs, about sixty miles due north. Stewart is sixty-three, with a taste for Hawaiian shirts and a friendly habit of calling other men “brother.” He picked me up in his bright blue Dodge Ram truck, the bed of which was strewn with segments of decorative curbs from his concrete business. Atkins, who is lively and silver-haired, wore a Razorbacks shirt under a fringed denim jacket and sat in the back seat. We took a scenic route toward the Ozarks, past cattle asleep on their sides, billboards quoting Bible verses, and the Greers Ferry Dam, where John F. Kennedy spoke at a dedication ceremony the month before his assassination. Road signs eventually welcomed us to Heber Springs (pop. 6,916). We looped around the mineral springs that give the town its name, and Atkins recalled visiting them with her grandmother to collect jugs of sulfur water. “She thought it would help her rheumatism,” Atkins said. On Main Street, Stewart gestured toward a row of S.U.V.s in the parking lot of an Eagle Bank & Trust. “That’s where his studio was,” he told me. “It had a great big skylight pointing toward the north.”

Heber Springs, in Disfarmer’s day, was a budding tourist destination. Vacationers rode in from around the South, on a new short-line railroad, to sample the springs and stay in hotels decorated with gingerbread trim. Disfarmer arrived in town, with his mother, in 1914, at the age of thirty, from Stuttgart, Arkansas, a German enclave where he’d worked as the night watchman at a mill. (His father, a rice farmer who’d fought for the Union, died when Disfarmer was about fourteen.) As with his other creative pursuit, fiddle playing, Disfarmer’s photography skills may have been self-taught, though some sources say that he underwent an apprenticeship. In Heber Springs, he set up shop at sites like the local theatre, where people would drop by, after vaudeville acts, to sit for portraits in front of a trompe-l’oeil backdrop of a Roman temple. He lived with his mother until a tornado flattened her home, on Thanksgiving Day, in 1926. She moved in with a relative, and he relocated to the studio on Main Street, a single-story stucco structure with living quarters separated from the work area by a curtain.

The few surviving photographs of Disfarmer show a long-faced man with thin lips that pucker inward. Even in a top hat and three-piece suit, he looks grim and somewhat dishevelled. His contemporaries described an “Ichabod-type feller” who rode about town on his horse, with a camera and tripod at the ready. For all the disarming intimacy of his portraiture, Disfarmer was by most accounts a chilly presence in the studio. “Instead of telling you to smile, he just took the photo—no ‘cheese’ or anything,” one former customer recalled, in the seventies. Nonetheless, his enterprise attracted churchgoing families, local baseball players, teen-agers on first dates, and droves of farmers from the surrounding countryside. “Mike had the world by the tail, and it was a downward pull, because he didn’t have no competition,” his last studio assistant, Bessie Utley, once said. “They’d line up just like it was a bargain basement.”

In the fifties, Disfarmer’s health declined, and he ventured out less. Children lingered near his studio and made a game of fleeing at the sight of him. One of Disfarmer’s sisters recalled that, when she and a group of relatives stopped by Heber Springs toward the end of his life, he asked them to leave. But family letters relate a few warmer encounters. Roy Fricker, Disfarmer’s late nephew, paid a visit to the studio with his wife, Louise, in 1958, just months before neighbors discovered Disfarmer dead on the floor. When the couple left, Disfarmer took the uncharacteristic step of walking them out to shake hands and say farewell. A photo taken by Roy that day shows the old man standing at the edge of a field, wearing rumpled clothes and a wide-brimmed hat. His hands are tucked behind his back to hide two cans of beer, the Frickers’ parting gift.

Some longtime residents of Heber Springs have tired of hearing from outsiders with a stake in the Disfarmer story. Jeannie McGary, who is in her seventies, was photographed by Disfarmer as a baby. A veteran volunteer at the local historical society, she’s given tours of Disfarmer’s work to European curators, documentary filmmakers, and, on several occasions, his heirs. She told me that she was skeptical of the motives behind their legal dispute. If Disfarmer hadn’t become as famous as he did, “I don’t think anybody would be interested now,” she said. Ellen Hobgood, who owns an art gallery in Heber Springs, found it hard to believe that Disfarmer’s relatives had only recently become aware of his fame. An artist herself, Hobgood specializes in large acrylic paintings of Santa Claus, which have been reproduced, with her permission, on a regional company’s tins of pecan toffee. She said that in theory she sympathized with the victims of copyright infringement. But, if Disfarmer’s heirs wanted a part in his legacy, she added, “They should have said something sooner.”

In Heber Springs, Stewart and Atkins stayed in the truck while I explored Main Street, a sleepy stretch of small businesses, including a coffee joint called the Jitterbug and a movie theatre with an Art Deco marquee. A hearing related to the Disfarmer case was scheduled for the following month, in probate court, to address the custody of the glass-plate negatives, and the siblings were wary of being seen with a reporter. In such a small town, Stewart told me, the news could get back to the judge and give the impression that the family was “trying to build a sympathy case with the public.”

Deal was no longer working for them. The previous March, just days before the coronavirus pandemic brought travel to a halt, he’d flown in from Virginia for a meeting about the case with Disfarmer’s family at Murry’s, a roadside restaurant east of Little Rock. More than thirty relatives from across the country wore nametags and gathered in a back room. A granddaughter of Disfarmer’s eldest brother, who had travelled from Connecticut, told me that Deal sat at her table but kept to himself. While waiting for his plate of barbecue, he stood up to explain that he’d been focussing his legal efforts on the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts Foundation, which owns the glass-plate negatives. The foundation seemed amenable to a settlement, Deal said, and he expected to have a draft of a proposed agreement soon.

A few weeks later, he presented one to the family. Under the terms of the agreement, the foundation would pay the family a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. In exchange, the foundation, along with Peter Miller and the Group, would be released from future liability, and the museum would retain the “permanent right” to exhibit the glass-plate negatives. Deal told me that expecting anything more would have been unrealistic, given the complexities of the case. For instance, even if the family managed to obtain the negatives, they’d need to secure copyrights before they could legally make prints or sue for infringement. That would be tricky, because Disfarmer had made his photographs long before the Copyright Act bolstered its protections for artists. Other legal professionals I consulted about the case agreed that it was, as one put it, “unsatisfyingly murky.”

To Disfarmer’s relatives, though, Deal’s proposal was an insult. The contract allowed the family only two days a year to “view, inspect, and inventory” the negatives, and made no mention of producing or selling prints. Soon after Deal presented the draft, they fired him. (In an e-mail, the foundation’s lawyers told me that they could not comment on confidential settlement proceedings but that “many of the purported facts conveyed by Mr. Disfarmer’s heirs about the negotiations are wrong.”) Over lunch outside Heber Springs—which we ate in the car, because of COVID—Stewart retrieved a rumpled, annotated copy of the document from a black dossier. “They thought they could just give us some money and we’d throw our hands up and praise God,” he told me, between bites of fried catfish from a Styrofoam container. “That’s piddling. That’s just them trying to sweep us under the carpet.” The worst part, in his mind, was that the foundation had shown so little faith in Disfarmer’s relatives as stewards of his archive.

“Even though we don’t live on a farm now,” Stewart told me, “they’d look at our family as uneducated, poor, average—”

Atkins interrupted him. “They’d think we were white trash,” she said.

For thirty years, prints made from the glass-plate negatives were the only versions of Disfarmer’s work in circulation. But collectors had their eyes on a more valuable set of assets: the original prints that Disfarmer himself had sold to customers during his lifetime. Rumor had it that when a few New York dealers had gone sniffing around Heber Springs for some, in the seventies, they’d had doors slammed in their faces. Michael Mattis, a collector based in New York, told me that, at the time he and his wife started acquiring art, in the eighties, Disfarmer was one of only a few prominent photographers whose original work remained elusive. “We were resigned to never adding him to our collection,” Mattis told me.

Then, in 2004, Mattis was approached by a young couple from Heber Springs, who had rounded up fifty original Disfarmer portraits from their family homes. Mattis, an inveterate completist, bought the whole batch on the spot, for a total of about twenty thousand dollars, assuming that they were the only ones he’d ever see. Instead, as he put it, “news ricocheted across greater Cleburne County, Arkansas, that some fruitcake art collector in New York had just paid a fortune for a few pages of family albums.” On eBay, Mattis found another Heber Springs resident selling original prints, and got in touch: “I told him, ‘Don’t post any more Disfarmers, and let’s work out an exclusive arrangement.’ ”

During the next year, a ragtag team of scouts working for Mattis scoured “every dirt road within a fifty-mile radius of Disfarmer’s studio,” he recalled. The median household income in Cleburne County is well below the national average, and it didn’t take long to find locals who would part with family photos for cash. Mattis’s scouts would identify the most marketable specimens—adult subjects were preferable to children, and overalls or otherwise folksy attire were favored over suits—and provide him with, as he put it, “Sotheby’s- or Christie’s-level condition reports.” They would usually pay between fifty and several hundred dollars per print, and they made copies to replace the newly vacant spots in the sellers’ family albums. Mattis, in turn, would pay the scouts up to a couple thousand dollars for each. He took out a mortgage on his home in Scarsdale and, in the end, bought more than three thousand photographs in total. Later, through Edwynn Houk Gallery, in New York, he sold hundreds of them to fellow-collectors for between seventy-five hundred and twenty-four thousand dollars apiece.

Another New York collector, Steven Kasher, heard about the bounty and began competing with Mattis, in what the Times called a “hush-hush entrepreneurial race to the finish.” Rhonda and Jamie Heaver, a married couple from Heber Springs who bought photos for Mattis—and, later, behind Mattis’s back, for Kasher—estimated that in a year’s time they made several hundred thousand dollars, more money than they had ever seen before or have since. Ellen Hobgood, the gallerist in Heber Springs, recalled a “feeding frenzy” among locals eager to cash in. One day, she told me, an elderly woman stopped by her store seeking advice about how to protect her Disfarmers: “She said, ‘I have relatives coming in and stealing them out of my photo albums, and I want them for my great-niece.’ ” Glenda Holden, who grew up around Heber Springs, said that she was devastated when her mother sold off the family’s entire collection of Disfarmers. “I said, ‘Mom! Why would you do that?’ ” Holden told me. She recalls that her mother, who has since died, replied, “Well, they made me copies. And they paid me. So why not?”

Unlike Disfarmer’s negatives, the original photographs have clear chains of custody. The customers who bought them from Disfarmer became their rightful owners, and the New York collectors who bought them from those customers’ heirs did so legally. In a book of Mattis’s Disfarmer images—which includes an astonishing portrait of Holden’s great-aunt Mary Stone Bullard, clad in a floral-patterned dress and flanked by all nine of her daughters—Mattis wrote that his operation in Heber Springs was aimed at “educating an initially skeptical rural community” about the “objects of significant artistic and cultural value” in their midst. When I spoke to him, he also credited himself with “transferring wealth” to Heber Springs. Chelsea Spengemann, an independent curator, told a different story in a show at the Neuberger Museum of Art, in Westchester, in 2015. The exhibition, “Becoming Disfarmer,” presented the original images less as fine art than as family keepsakes that the New York dealers had wrenched from their intended context. Spengemann displayed some of Disfarmer’s images between glass panes so that visitors could examine the handwritten inscriptions and bits of dried album glue on the back sides. An essay in the exhibition catalogue quotes a scathing assessment of Mattis and Kasher’s methods, from The Arkansas Historical Quarterly: “By what logic are photographs preserved in Arkansas homes properly understood as lost and thus in need of being ‘recovered’ for redistribution to wealthier homes in other places?”

The group of relatives fighting for Disfarmer’s archive is now about sixty strong. The probate hearing regarding the glass-plate negatives, originally scheduled for April, was postponed at the request of the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts Foundation. It’s now set for August. In an e-mail, Peter Miller implied that Disfarmer’s relatives have exaggerated their connection to their “beloved uncle Mike” in order to position themselves as legitimate heirs. He pointed out that, when Disfarmer died, no one came forward to pay for a tombstone. (According to court documents, the funeral bill was deducted from the estate.) “Now, sixty-two years later, his family wants to take ownership,” Miller wrote, adding, “I’m sure you can see the humor in this.”

He dismissed the notion that he’d profited significantly from sales of Disfarmer prints. Any checks that he did receive, he told me, would have been split between the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts Foundation and members of the Group, which has often included as many as seventy people. “Each person gets eight bucks, you know?” Miller told me, a bit impatiently. “I don’t want you to imply that I made a bunch of money from the pictures, which I did not.” (Representatives for the foundation told me that, to the best of their knowledge, it has never received revenue from private sales of Disfarmer prints, and that any earnings from the negatives are “negligible” compared with the cost of preserving them.)

Today, the Group lives in Little Rock, on what its members call the Block, a row of stately homes in the city’s serene historic district. As in the seventies, they operate a handful of successful businesses. On my last morning in Arkansas, Elizabeth Bowles, the Group’s current president, invited me to meet her at her nearby office, where several Disfarmer prints hang in gilt frames on the walls. The daughter of the Group’s late founder, Bowles is the chief executive of a local Internet-service provider. She wore plum lipstick and an Apple watch. Ron and Fawn Slattery told me that they suspect the Disfarmer profits allowed the Group to “buy mansions” and build their business empire. Bowles dismissed that notion as “complete crap.” “I personally have a great attachment to Disfarmer, in that I think it’s amazing art,” she said. But for the Group, she added, sales of Disfarmer’s photography had been nothing more than a “blip on the radar.” Prints made from the glass-plate negatives are currently advertised, for fifteen hundred dollars apiece, on a digital marketplace designed by Bowles’s company, but she told me that the site has long been defunct.

The Slatterys have continued to investigate artists’ estates. In 2019, the couple went door to door in Illinois, as they did in Arkansas, to track down the heirs of one of the most famous American outsider artists, Henry Darger. A Chicago janitor, Darger died in 1973, leaving behind an unseen, furiously original body of watercolors and collages. His landlords, Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner, discovered the work and became the stewards of Darger’s estate. (Kiyoko has said that Darger bequeathed his works to Nathan, who died in 1997.) Darger’s pieces have since sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Last fall, much like Disfarmer’s family, more than a dozen of Darger’s relatives teamed up and retained a lawyer. Eva Subotnik, a law professor at St. John’s University who has written extensively on intellectual-property debates in photography, worries that such efforts may discourage future collectors from salvaging work that would otherwise never be seen. “It would obviously be a real shame if the next Vivian Maier is lost to history,” she said. “Likewise, it would be ironic if copyright law plays more of a role in burying great work than birthing it.”

“We owe Peter Miller something,” Stewart told me, during our drive from Heber Springs back to Little Rock. Atkins agreed: “If he had never come to Arkansas, those negatives would still be moldering.” Both siblings confessed that they find many of Disfarmer’s photographs indistinguishable from other portraits in their mother’s albums. In their minds, their great-great-uncle’s fame is largely a result of the art world’s shrewd marketing. “They took a sow’s ear and made a silk purse out of it, is what they done,” Atkins said. In the hopes that their legal campaign will prevail, she and Stewart have been honing their own sales instincts. Recently, while doing research for the probate case on ancestry.com, Atkins noticed that Disfarmer’s baptism certificate, from 1884, used an alternate spelling of his family name: not “Meyer” but “Maier.” Could Mike and Vivian be distant kin?

To Atkins, it sounded like a blockbuster proposition. “I’d love to try to connect this to Vivian Maier,” she told me later, as we sat with her brother around their mother’s kitchen table, appraising Disfarmer’s sombre wedding portrait of their grandparents. “That would enhance the value of his stuff, and her stuff, too.”

“It could be a marketing technique,” Stewart said. “We don’t wanna do anything illegal, but—”

“It’s a no-brainer,” Atkins continued. “I’m just an old country hick, and I’ll tell you that. I see possibilities there.”