Doris May Ullmann was one of my ‘celebrated female artists’ 2 posts ago.
I was intrigued by her images so I delved deeper.
Ulmann’s father and brother immigrated to New York in 1867 from the Czech Republic by way of Germany. Doris grew up on NYC’s upper west side in a refined, genteel world. In Europe. The family had been Reformed Jews but in New York, Doris’ branch was part of Felix Adler’s Ethical Culture Movement that believed education was the route to improve humanity. They incorporated ideas from various religious systems. There, Doris attended their teacher training course and obtained a teachers’ degree.
At 32, Ulmann married a surgeon after nursing her mother through a final illness. Next, she attended Clarence H. White School of Photography, the first art photography school in the United States. Like most early art photographers, including legendary Alfred Stieglitz, White School students worked in a soft-focus style known as Pictorialism. They often manipulated the surfaces of their prints to create unique images like paintings. That is what I enjoy most about her work.
Ulmann valued the individual, regardless of economic or ethnic background. She was particularly moved by “a face that has the marks of living intensely, that expresses some phase of life, some dominant quality or intellectual power.” Ulmann devoted most of her photographic career to documenting the people and rural culture of the American South and Appalachia.
The majority of her portraits depict elderly people, reflecting Ulmann’s belief that “the face of an older person, perhaps not beautiful in the strictest sense, is usually more appealing than the face of a younger person who has scarcely been touched by life.”
Ulmann’s best-known work was produced when she visited the South Carolina plantation of her friend, novelist Julie Peterkin, who employed a large community of Gullah workers to cultivate her fields (Gullahs are descendants of West African slaves who settled mainly on the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia and developed a distinctive creole language and culture). The portraits convey a haunting, supernatural element, as though the photographer was looking backward from the future.
She devoted more and more time pursuing her longstanding interest in people “for whom life had not been a dance.”
Shortly before her death, at age fifty-two, the Library of Congress exhibited more than 100 platinum prints of Ulmann’s Appalachian subjects.
https://www.loc.gov/rr/print/coll/womphotoj/ulmannessay.html
https://dpul.princeton.edu/wa/catalog/3n204288w
https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/ulmann-doris-may
https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/person/103KE3
https://www.loc.gov/rr/print/coll/womphotoj/ulmannessay.htmlJudith Keller. Doris Ulmann, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1996), 36, 38. ©1996, J. Paul Getty Trust
