Doris Ulmann: 7 works

'Doris Ulmann photographed members of the Cherokee tribe on a reservation in western North Carolina. In this image she represented an unidentified young woman holding an example of the simple gray pottery that typified the tribe's work.'

'Doris Ulmann's photographs of Southern black people often seem to idealize their subjects. In the 1920s and 1930s, Ulmann, a woman of means from New York, documented what she perceived to be a vanishing black culture.'

'Doris Ulmann made this portrait in South Carolina, where she took summer trips in 1929 and 1930.'

'Doris Ulmann photographed Sister Mary Paul from below; consequently, she looks down slightly at the viewer, maintaining a serene, patient expression consistent with her divine calling.'

'In Roll, Jordan, Roll, novelist Julia Peterkin's and Doris Ulmann's collaborative study of the vanishing Gullah culture of coastal blacks in the Southeastern United States, Peterkin described the pivotal age for a girl in Gullah folklore: Twelve is the age of responsibility, when the recording angel in heaven writes a child's name in a book and marks down every sin against it¿ .'

'Ulmann's photograph is a visual metaphor for this crucial period of development described by Peterkin.'

'With a potted fern and dried leaf on the ledge in front, Ulmann created a kind of occupational portrait, carefully framing the herbalist between the columns of a porch.'