[Cobbler, West Ninety-Second Street, New York City]

The laborer shown at work appears to have been a dominant theme in Doris Ulmann's photography from the beginning. This composition is strikingly similar to contemporaneous images of tradespeople that the German photographer August Sander (1876-1964) would begin to organize into typological categories in the 1920s. Sander's personal archive of German faces, albeit more systematic than Ulmann's American series, is comparative in its technical aspects, nationalistic enthusiasm, and obsessive, independent nature (see 84.XM.126.141, 84.XM.498.16, 84.XM.126.475).

In a relatively brief session interrupting this cobbler's day, Ulmann made five six-by-eight-inch negatives of the same man in different poses inside his shop. In one, he is seen surrounded by shelves of shoes; in another, he is shown in the doorway at closer range, revealing the real signs, the accumulated dirt, of work.

Judith Keller. Doris Ulmann, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1996), 18. ©1996, J. Paul Getty Trust.