[Fisherman with Wooden Leg, Near Brookgreen Plantation, Murrells Inlet, South Carolina]

For a brief time in the early 1920s Julia Peterkin's family owned Brookgreen Plantation on the South Carolina coast near Murrells Inlet. Peterkin (1880-1961), a writer, would spend her summers at the inlet, making creative use of the setting while working in a small cottage. On at least one occasion Doris Ulmann traveled from New York to Myrtle Beach; from there the two artists went out in search of photographic material for Peterkin’s novel Roll, Jordan, Roll (1933) (https://primo.getty.edu). As she had when she first began photographing, Ulmann sought out the working men of the area. The fishermen of the coastal communities were apparently a favorite subject. She exposed at least twelve plates of this disabled young man and made more than twenty negatives of a man and boy oystering (87.XM.89.159). Ulmann probably directed the poses—the position of this lone fisherman is remarkable in its quiet grace and its reference to the carefully balanced contrapposto of the Apollo Belvedere (http://www.museivaticani.va). Peterkin may have been more interested in fiction than the familiar, but she nevertheless promoted Ulmann's quest for the authentic, especially when it involved picturing African American life in the South.

Adapted from Judith Keller. Doris Ulmann, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1996), 64. ©1996, J. Paul Getty Trust.