Jason Reed, North Georgia Chairmaker

In his 1937 Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands Allen Eaton (1878-1962) states that "chairmaking is rarely a full-time job, most who carry it on being farmers who fill in between the seasons of outdoor work" (https://primo.getty.edu). Jason Reed is probably one of the craftsmen-farmers Eaton sent Doris Ulmann and her assistant John Jacob (“Jack”) Niles (1892-1980) to photograph. She exposed some fourteen negatives of Reed, recording him at work making furniture with his simple wooden tools, enjoying his grandchildren, and, here, resting with his cane, perhaps seated on a product of his own handiwork. Ulmann seems to have been as fascinated by the aging forms of her subjects as by their faces; her own partial lameness after a 1926 accident no doubt encouraged this empathy with the disabled and infirm. It also increased the necessity of a strong assistant like Niles, who, coincidentally, had a slight limp himself due to wounds suffered in World War I.

Judith Keller. Doris Ulmann, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1996), 78. ©1996, J. Paul Getty Trust.