Landscape with Pump and Barn

Although Doris Ulmann spent most of her time photographing people, she also made some of the finest Pictorialist landscapes known, rare examples of which can be found in the collection of the New York Historical Society. She continued to address this subject with a more Modernist interpretation during her travels in the South. This composition lies somewhere between landscape and still life, Romanticism and Constructivism. It contains elements of material culture—an old pump, battered metal tankards, tin roof, and whitewashed fence—and fragments of natural forms—a fertile valley, forested hills, and overcast sky. With the simple lines of vernacular architecture and ordinary implements, Ulmann has constructed a sophisticated collage that is a challenge to contemporary work in platinum by photographers Paul Strand (1880-1976) and Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946).

Judith Keller. Doris Ulmann, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1996), 82. ©1996, J. Paul Getty Trust.