May 29, 2015 /Photography News/ Born 133 years ago today, on 29 May 1882, in New York, Doris Ulmann was was
an American photographer best known for her dignified portraits of the
people of Appalachia, particularly craftsmen and musicians such as Jean
Ritchie's family.
Ulmann began her photography career in 1918, as a portraitist. Trained as a pictorialist by Clarence White,
Ulmann's early work includes a series of portraits of prominent
intellectuals, artists and writers: William Butler Yeats, John Dewey,
Max Eastman, Sinclair Lewis, Lewis Mumford, Joseph Wood Krutch, Martha
Graham, Anna Pavlova, Paul Robeson, and Lillian Gish.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s she travelled through Eastern
Kentucky and other parts of Appalachia photographing the people of the
region, with a profound respect for her sitters and an ethnographer's
eye for culture.
Ulmann's equipment was somewhat cumbersome and old-fashioned for her
time. She most often used a 6½ x 8½ inch, tripod-mounted view camera,
although the lightweight, hand-held camera was more prevalent, and she
produced soft-focus platinum prints. The muted, warm tonality of the
platinum image was a gentle complement to her respectful, sympathetic
portrayals of subjects whose lives were different from her own.
Doris Ulmann died August 28, 1934. Upon her death, a foundation she had established took custody of her images.
The primary repository of Ulmann's work is at the University of Oregon
Libraries' Special Collections. The Doris Ulmann collection, PH038,
includes 2,739 silver gelatin glass plate negatives, 304 original
matted prints, and 79 albums (containing over 10,000 Lifshey proof
prints) assembled by the Doris Ulmann Foundation between 1934 and 1937.
The silver gelatin glass plate negatives are the only known remaining
Ulmann negatives. Of the 304 matted photographs, approximately half are
platinum prints that were mounted and signed by Ulmann; the others are
silver gelatin prints developed by Lifshey. Additional collections can
be found at Berea College in Kentucky (primarily images taken in the
vicinity of Berea), The University of Kentucky (consisting of 16
original signed portraits, and 186 original silver nitrate prints), and
the New York Historical Society (primarily of prominent New Yorkers). As
art objects, her photographs are also part of many museum collections
including the Smithsonian and the J. Paul Getty Museum.
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