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DORIS ULMANN
1882 - 1934
The life and work of the American photographer Doris Ulmann (1882-1934) mader her perhaps an unlikely person to work in the rural South. Born in New York City, the eldest daughter of a prosperous German-Jewish father and American mother, she attended the Ethical Culture School and studied psychology at Columbia University. During this period she came under the influence of photographer Clarence H. White. In the early 1920s she married a surgeon, who shared her enthusiasm for amateur photography. She began her career as a studio portraitist, photographing and publishing pictures of notables from the worlds of medicine, journalism, and the arts. Her Park Avenue apartment located just two blocks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, became the setting for an extended series of photographs of the "urban moderns."
In the mid-1920s Ulmann divorced Jaeger and met John Jacob 'Jack' Niles, a musician and actor ten years her junior who became her close friend and assistant. Together they began to document the culture of the American South "Folklore and photographic expeditions" was the way Niles described the extensive, annual car excursions he and Ulmann made between 1928 and 1934 in the Southern Highlands, that area of the Appalachian Mountains that extends from the Virginias down into the Georgia and Alabama. In 1933 and 1934, having put themselves at the service of Allen Eaton, who was preparing a book on the subject, Ulmann and Niles recorded in a more systematic way the character and handwork of the Highland craftspeople. Ulmann collaborated as well with the novelist Julia Peterkin, producing ROLL, JORDAN, ROLL (1933), an overview in expository prose, fiction, and photographs of the vanishing black Gullah culture of South Carolina. She died in 1934, before many of her negatives were printed. Considered one of the foremost photographers in the United States in the 1930s, she disappeared from public awareness until the 1970s.
Weston, Naef, ed. DORIS ULMANN: PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM. Malibu, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1996: 5-7, article by Judith Keller.
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