Living without pretense

Photographer Mike Disfarmer’s life lends itself to mythologizing, and he got the ball rolling. He claimed to have been deposited by a tornado into the backyard of the Meyer family home in Indiana in 1884. He later settled with his mother in Heber Springs, Ark. A few years after her death in 1935, he shed his birth name and dubbed himself Disfarmer as a way of publicly distancing himself from the cotton, corn and sorghum growers in the area.

He opened a photography studio in his house, and when that was leveled by a tornado, he built another, where he also lived. He kept his studio open seven days a week, producing thousands of portraits, yet remained detached from the Heber Springs community. He is said to have had no friends, attended no church and never married. His demeanor was as stripped down as his aesthetic.

Not long after he died in 1959, the entire contents of his studio, including his equipment and negatives, were purchased for $5. One day in the ‘70s, the editor of a photography magazine received a packet of Disfarmer prints from out of the blue (by mail, rather than tornado) and helped to orchestrate an exhibition and book. Thus began a dramatic act of art historical discovery and rescue -- fueled by the increasingly robust photography market -- that has capitalized on Disfarmer’s eccentricities and installed him in the canon of American photographic masters.

Disfarmer’s portraits, 50 of which are on view at the Rose Gallery, certainly deserve the attention. They are fascinating vernacular documents and concise, compelling images. The great irony of the story is that what makes Disfarmer’s work so captivating is the unromanticized nature of his vision. His pictures are small (contact prints made from postcard-sized glass plate negatives) and emphatically direct. After some early, more conventional work, he dispensed with glamorizing backgrounds and props as well as purposefully elegant poses. For two generations, he photographed the men, women and children of Heber Springs as they stood plainly before a dark backdrop or a white one with a single dark stripe. There appears to have been no pretense on either side of the camera.

The photographs in the Rose show date from the 1930s through the early ‘50s. Men pose in military uniform, women hold their babies, buddies drape their arms around each other’s shoulders. But mostly the subjects simply stare with level, sober gazes. Certain facts of their identities can be gleaned from their clothing or hairstyles, but little is to be learned from their expressions and nothing at all from context.

It is not known whether Disfarmer had any kind of photographic education, or if he was aware of broader trends in the medium, such as the great chronicle of 1930s America made under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration. Disfarmer’s was a commercial enterprise, the pictures made to order, but cumulatively they too take stock of a specific time and place. They form a visual inventory conducted with the crisp clarity and neutrality associated with Germany’s New Objectivity photographers, particularly August Sander and Albert Renger-Patzsch.

Smiles occur here and there, but Disfarmer clearly preferred a more natural, less contrived look. His image of twins identically overdressed in thick wool suits looks like a direct ancestor of Diane Arbus’ famous twin picture decades later in its defiance of the cuteness usually associated with mirror-image miniatures. Women stand with their coats on in a few pictures, which seems surprising, but they appear as ready to be captured on film as all the rest. Disfarmer didn’t seem to strategize or editorialize. He presented each individual as another ordinary/extraordinary visual fact, centered in the frame like a specimen to be recorded, preserved and perhaps partially known.

Rose Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-8440, through March 1. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.rosegallery.net

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The De la Torres are tempting fate

Mixed media doesn’t get any more mixed than in the outrageously smart, irresistibly ugly, gloriously provocative work of Einar and Jamex de la Torre. The brothers’ newest sculptures, at Koplin del Rio, continue where their previous work left off, identifying borders and violating them -- political boundaries and the line between tragic and comic as it pertains to history and contemporary culture, plus the line between good and bad taste.

Born in Guadalajara, the De la Torres live and work on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. They don’t confine themselves to standard border issues of trade and immigration but instead take a broad approach to the confluence and collision of cultures. Conquest of all sorts is examined from all sides. Cycles of encounter, assimilation and repudiation play out with alarming, ridiculous regularity. References to China crop up in the new work; Roman Catholic symbols are a mainstay. Theirs is an art of informed irreverence whose meaning can never be fully deciphered.

Blown glass with the glossy appeal of hard candy consorts with fake fur, tiny rubber chickens, beer bottles, coins, dice, plastic toys and chopsticks. Che Guevara makes an appearance, as do Mao Tse-tung, the Dalai Lama, the devil and the Virgin Mary. “Diablo Carbo” teeters above a pyramid of Mexican pastries. An “Olmec Lullaby” involves a skeleton riding a pig atop a translucent sculptural head full of pinto beans.

A spoken word piece on video in the center of a huge, round mandala/clock/sundial expounds poetically on hybrid existence and the loss of origin. In their tactical assault on the senses, the De la Torre brothers don’t forsake origin but return to it persistently to identify pathways taken and those yet available. Possibility and fate crowd together in their work, as hilarious as it is tough, as gaudy as it is seductive.

Koplin Del Rio, 6031 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (310) 836-9055, through Feb. 23. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.koplindelrio.com

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Tsuchida’s camera changes its focus

In spite of Japan’s long and rich photographic history, barely a handful of the country’s practitioners are widely known in the U.S.: Eikoh Hosoe, Shomei Tomatsu, Daido Moriyama, Hiroshi Sugimoto and perhaps a few more. The Michael Dawson Gallery introduces another, Hiromi Tsuchida. Tsuchida (b. 1939) has chronicled Japanese culture through numerous projects, focusing on gay men, identical twins, the survivors and landscape of Hiroshima, traditional costumes and people at parties.

His first solo show in L.A. begins with work from 1969 and stretches nearly to the present, in 17 photographs from three distinct series. The show’s broad span and compact size work against each other a bit, but an intriguing sensibility emerges, especially from the early prints.

The series excerpted in the show trace an arc from authenticity to artifice, from the intimate and rural to the predominantly urban and communal. The newest pictures are the most accessible, as they document a familiar kind of social phenomenon -- the mass event. Whether the participants are climbing on dunes overlooking the Sea of Japan or frolicking at a faux Swiss chalet water park, their individual identities are suppressed. The prints are large and abuzz with vivid, synthetic color.

Contrast that with the small, grainy, black-and-white photographs from the earliest series, “Zokushin,” or “Gods of the Earth.” In one of the most compelling pictures, from 1973, a priest dressed in white but for sunglasses and wristwatch stands on the rugged slope of Mt. Fuji, walking stick in hand. A few crates of empty bottles rest nearby on the dark, volcanic terrain, the profane cluttering the sacred. A shroud of mist pushes into the frame from above. Tsuchida’s stare of searching intimacy is perfectly mirrored in the priest’s stance. Over time, the personal tone -- tenderness, even -- in such early pictures gives way to a more sociological detachment, as Tsuchida’s focus shifts from the idiosyncratic and regional to the homogenized crowd. Not only the subjects, but the pictures too, are less distinctive.

Michael Dawson Gallery, 535 N. Larchmont Blvd., (323) 469-2186, through March 29. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.michaeldawsongallery .com

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Wu sees oozing of cosmic strife

Peter Wu titles his show at Patrick Painter “Black Scabs on a Phantom Limb,” but the work is less macabre than it sounds. A Canadian-born painter living in L.A., Wu gives us apocalypse lite, a vision of dark, creeping ooze that politely leaves room for sprightly patterns to spread and proliferate: Aubrey Beardsley meets the La Brea Tar Pits.

The paintings flirt with chaos but never let things go too far, having also pledged allegiance to decorative order. This friction between opposing forces is the most interesting aspect of Wu’s work. It is played out through the layering and interweaving of bursts of color and broad, inky splotches with passages of tightly rendered ornamentation: stripes, concentric circles, feathers and scales. In one painting, those self-contained patterns articulate a screaming Medusa head, but most of the work is less literal and more about competing energies and vaguely cosmic strife. The tension goes slack rather quickly, though. Dazzling at first glance, Wu’s doodles of doom ultimately feel more affected than affecting.

Patrick Painter, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-5988, through Feb. 16. Closed Sundays, Mondays. www.patrickpainter.com