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The arrival in Los Angeles in about 1971 of the 3M Color-in-Color photocopier—an “office machine” so expensive, specialized and rudimentary that store front centers in major cities handled most of the demand—was perhaps received more enthusiastically by artists than by the business community. Though the machine could be found throughout the United States and was used by artists elsewhere, the Los Angeles experimental atmosphere was particularly conducive to its use, with Robert Heinecken, Suda House, Cheryl Leonard, Ilene Segalove, Arthur Taussig and numerous others employing this new photographic technique.

Ellen Land-Weber was one of those who took a deep interest in the new technology. Classically trained in photography at the University of Iowa, she came to Los Angeles in 1969, whereupon she met Heinecken and other prominent figures on the scene. Asked to teach extension courses at UCLA, she introduced a class to the 3M machine. She became so excited that she first took a part time job at the center in exchange for time on the machine, then bought one of her own.

The 1974 work reproduced here takes advantage of the copy machine’s precision of detail (and makes a virtue of its pleasantly distorted color) by playing direct, perspectiveless pictures of plant forms against the lens-flattened, camera-produced images of a house and child.