Photos by Sandra Louise Dyas

     

"This book comes from my discovery of over 700 original photographs, taken in several Arkansas towns (and, serendipitously, in North Carolina too!) between 1937 and 1941. These photographs were made by the Massengill family: a mother who started the business by selling two dozen pullet chickens to buy the equipment needed to build a homemade photo booth in a trailer, and her two newlywed sons with their young brides. Each of the couples traveled from one small town to the next, towing similar homemade trailers behind their cars, inviting folks inside to have their pictures made, three for a dime. The photographs, many hand-tinted, beautifully illustrate rural family life during one of the most difficult economic times  in the history of the American South." 

 

Making Pictures: Three for a Dime, handmade artist's book, 13-1/2 x 8-1/2 in.

You can click here to download a PDF containing pages and photographs from Maxine's book. 

"There is also a logbook and a diary, detailing the expenses they incurred, the money they made, and the inevitable hard times they encountered. After years of sifting through these images and records, I have compiled a portion of the materials as a limited edition artist book recounting the lives of these early, roaming photographers.

The book is an archivally-printed, hand-bound object (bound by no less than Julie Leonard, by the way), editioned at 25; this is the last copy I actually printed.

 

If you read the text, you might be moved to smile or cry, or both.

From Thelma Massengill's wedding night to Lance Massengill's thorough record-keeping, the book reveals, in photographs and writing, the nuances of daily life for an Arkansas family during the depression.

I am currently making my own photo-trailer using the family's original camera lens, with which I plan to travel Arkansas making pictures, three for a dime."

                                                                     - Maxine Payne

 
Maxine Payne is a photographer living and working in Arkansas, where her grandparents raised her. She works to find ways to engage community in her work and to speak to the idea of place. Maxine is the Judy and Randy Wilbourn Odyssey Professor, Associate Professor of Art, and Chair of the Art Department at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkasas. She has collaborated with anthropologist Anne Goldberg documenting the lives of rural women in Costa Rica, the U.S./Mexico border and Africa, and is currently collaborating with biologist Matthew Moran to document the environment and people of the "Big Woods" region in Arkansas. Since 2004, she has photographed hundreds of Arkansas Historic Bridges for the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department.  

You can click here to visit Maxine's website (maxinepayne.com), where you can see more of her work.

Penland School is in the preliminary stages of planning a new photography studio that will allow the school's photo program to teach contemporary image-making using photographic techniques that span the history of the medium, from daguerreotypes to digital images. As part of the fundraising for this project, photographer, instructor, and trustee Alida Fish has worked with a group of past Penland instructors - Keith Johnson, Jacquelyn Tait Leebrick,  Chris Peregoy, Jim Stone, Caroline Hickman Vaughan, Terri Warpinski, Heather F. Wetzel, Jo Whaley, and John Wood - to create a suite of photographs, most of which have ties to the Penland campus or environs. The sale of these works will go directly toward Penland's new photography studio. Penland is grateful for and proud of the support these artists have shown for the future of the photography program.

Below are a few images from the portfolio; you can click here to view the complete suite of photographs on our website (penland.org/photos).

Alida Fish, Walking with Pygmalion #29, gelatin silver print, 28-3/4 x 24-3/4 in.

Chris Peregoy, Morning View, pigment-toned palladium print, 16 x 20 in. (framed)