Making Pictures: Three for a Dime: The Massengill Photographs, Arkansas, 1934-1945/corn Dodgers & Hoss Hair Pullers: Arkansas at 78 RPM

Making Pictures: Three For a Dime: The Massengill Photographs, Arkansas, 1934-1945. By Maxine Payne. (Atlanta: Dust-to-Digital, 2014, and Lexington, KY: Institute 193, 2014. Pp. 180. Massengill family tree, introductory essays by Phillip March Jones and Maxine Payne, illustrations, commentary by Lance Warren Massengill and Evelyn Ritter Massengill, diary entries by Thelma Bullard Massengill and Lawrence Massengill. $30.00.)Corn Dodgers & Hoss Hair Pullers: Arkansas at 78 RPM. (Atlanta: Dust-to-Digital, 2014. CD, 32-page booklet, liner notes by Tony Russell, photographs from the collection of Maxine Payne. $12.00.)Great news for locals on the art and cultural history fronts: Dust-to-Digital has come to Arkansas with a wonderful two-in-onc package. Making Pictures: Three for a Dime is a collection of wallet-sized commercial portrait photographs made by the Massengill family in north-central Arkansas during the 1930s and early 1940s, while Corn Dodgers & Hoss Hair Pullers: Arkansas at 78 RPM is a CD with twenty-six recordings made by Arkansas musicians from 1928 to 1937. Each stands on its own (and can be ordered separately), but the collections overlap in time and space and their association is beautifully synergistic. Photographs from the book illustrate the CD, and the book is pictured on the CD's back cover.Dust-to-Digital is a highly regarded Atlanta-based husband-and-wife music reissue label, maybe right now the nation's most active, a worthy partner to the great European juggernauts (Bear Family in Germany, Document in Austria) and their U.S. counterparts (Arhoolie in California and Yazoo in New York, to name just two). Their 2003 set, Goodbye, Babylon, is still widely regarded as the finest gospel reissue set ever. Reissuing old records has been a booming business in recent decades, with skillfully remastered and exhaustively researched releases appearing regularly. The current gold standard, just for example, may be the double-barreled The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records, a combined production of Austin-based Revenant Records and Third Man records, founded in Detroit but now based in Nashville. Each volume sells for $400 and features 800 tracks (that's not a misprint) on a USB drive, accompanied by elaborate discographie and biographical materials (including a rich selection of period advertisements).Making Pictures and Corn Dodgers & Hoss Hair Pullers are less lavishly produced (with accompanying savings to purchasers), but they get the essentials right. The photographs of Making Pictures, effectively arranged and edited by photographer and Hendrix College art professor Maxine Payne, are divided into two sections ("Plates" and "Albums"), the first presented one-to-a-page and the second with as many as nine, still mounted on sheets torn from photo albums. "Plates" is much the larger, the heart of the volume, with 122 photographs of young people and old people (there's a general sequencing by age). Pets and dolls appear, with and without owners. Most are individual portraits of humans, though various twosomes (siblings, sweethearts and spouses, pals) are common, and groups of three appear occasionally. Props include the U.S. flag, Coca-Cola bottles, a watermelon, and a banana; one woman models a swimsuit while another turns her back to the camera; two men flourish pistols, and boys appear as pint-sized sailors, engineers, policemen, cowboys, and soldiers. "Albums" offers more of the same, though printing the photographs attached to their albums highlights their important role in constructing and sustaining family identity. …