Victor Burgin.
New York : Lapp Princess Press, c1977.
1 v. : chiefly ill. ; 16 cm.
N7433.35 .U6 L37 1977 ARTLCKS

Victor Burgin's Family is one of eleven volumes published in a series in the late 1970s by Amy Baker's Lapp Princess Press. Baker began the series with the aim of providing a conceptual space for artists to explore the possibilities and restraints of the book form. Meant to be affordable, portable, and easily reproducible, Baker set the dimensions of each work at six inches square and selected papers and inks that were widely available to printers.

Burgin's response to his commission was to embrace the sequentiality that a bound book demands, presenting a textual narrative, a series of images, and a progression of upper- and lowercase letters. The thick paper pages, bound with a plastic spiral, mimic the design and simplicity of children's alphabet books. Yet, as in many of his other works, Burgin appropriates this simplicity in order to draw attention to the complex, unwritten cultural messages that photographs and other cultural objects can bear. As he textually describes the submission of family structure to the dictates of capitalism, he also employs ordinary, black-and-white photos in order to illustrate his point, the neutral-seeming images "absorbing" meanings in their juxtaposition with his text. And hidden in the letters, photos, and caption words on the right side of each page are the elements of three overarching concepts: F-a-m-i-l-y (spelled by the letters at the top corners), F-a-t-h-e-r (spelled by the first letters of the objects in the photos), and M-o-t-h-e-r (spelled by the first letters of the words beneath the photos). These three roles are always highly dependent upon, and influenced by, the socio-economic forces that surround them. 

Further reading on Lapp Princess Press:
Korner, A. "Interview: Amy Baker, Editor of Lapp Princess Press Ltd., Talks to Athony Korner." Drawing 1, no. 1 (May-June, 1979): 8-10.
[AMF]

pictured by Rudolf Eickemeyer, Jr.
New York : R.H. Russell, 1901
[64] p. : ill. ; 37 cm
TR739.5 .E53 1901 F ARTLCKM

By 1901, the year in which Rudolph Eickemeyer, Jr.’s The Old Farm was published, American industry had modernized enough to make a purely agrarian society seem quaint. For Eickemeyer the quaint and simple were a draw, as was the ability of the modern medium of photography to convey notions of the pastoral, especially when practiced in a pictorial mode. For this volume, he selected images of farm life that represented “the smaller, more intimately personal sort on which our forefathers learned their first lesson of hardship and endurance.” Interspersed with these quiet, picturesque photographs are quotations from famous poems (by Wordsworth, Tennyson, Emerson, and others) which emphasize the images’ mood.

The Old Farm was meant to appeal to a popular audience interested in traditional subjects, and the book’s format of pleasant, graphically framed images and inserted text was reminiscent of the Kodak family photo albums that were becoming increasingly popular at the time. Indeed, Eickemeyer was interested in producing images that had mass-market appeal, a commercial stance that was at odds with the interests of many of his contemporaries. On a practical level, the photos’ half-tone printing assured that many copies could be printed quite easily. A printing process developed during the 1880s and 90s, half-tone printing involves the rephotographing of an image through a screen, which separates the image visually into discrete, easily printable dots. It is used in newspaper printing even today.

Further reading on nostalgia and popular American photography:
Davis, Keith F. An American Century of Photography : From Dry-Plate to Digital : The Hallmark Photographic Collection. Kansas City, Mo.: Hallmark Cards, in association with H.N. Abrams, 1999.
Siegel, Elizabeth. Galleries of Friendship and Fame : A History of Nineteenth-Century American Photograph Albums. New Haven Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010.
[AMF]

under the supervision of John W. Ehninger. Illustrated by selections from American poets.
New York : W.A. Townsend & Company, 1859.
10 p., [12] leaves, [12] leaves of plates : ill. (mounted phot.). ; 35 cm.
NE2003 .E45 1859 ARTLCKM

With the publication of this album of albumen prints in 1859, John W. Ehninger introduced the photographic technique of cliché-verre, which he had learned from its practitioners while studying in Paris, to the United States. Cliché-verre (“glass negative”) is a process of transferring a drawing from a glass plate to photo-sensitized paper using projected light. It is, in a sense, a form of etching that does not require the use of a metal plate for intaglio printing. Rather, the artist draws into an opaque medium directly onto the glass plate, sometimes with varnishes added to allow for tonal variations. The resulting photographic print, created without a camera, has the linear, etched looked of a traditional, ink-based print.

Ehninger’s choice of this technique for Autograph Etchings was partly for practical reasons: he wished to produce multiple copies of the album’s drawings using a method that was simpler and more efficient than etching or engraving. Perhaps more importantly, he was interested in selecting a printing method that did not involve the intermediation of an engraver (what Ehninger called "the inevitable distortions which accompany the best efforts of the engraver"); instead, the artist’s hand was directly reflected in the print. To create the book, Ehninger asked twelve American artists to illustrate twelve American poems (Ehninger himself provided one of the illustrations). The result is an album of images and text with themes ranging from “Autumn” to “Noon” to “Childhood.” While the cliché-verre technique had a French flavor, the album itself was resolutely American, the selected poems celebrating the American landscape and its agricultural and cultural traditions. The illustrations were contributed by well known American artists such as Asher B. Durand and Eastman Johnson, as well as by younger artists at the beginning of their careers.

Further reading on Ehninger and cliché-verre:
Glassman, Elizabeth, and Marilyn F. Symmes. Cliché-Verre, Hand-Drawn, Light-Printed : A Survey of the Medium from 1839 to the Present. Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1980.
[AMF]