DORIS ULMANN IN BRASSTOWN: THE PLATINUM PRINT AS UNRULY OBJECT

Abstract

In 1933 and 1934, Doris Ulmann traveled to Brasstown, North Carolina, at the invitation of Olive Dame Campbell, founder of the John C. Campbell Folk School. Drawing on her interest in marginalized and rural populations, Ulmann photographed students at the Folk School and others in the Brasstown area with the intention of using her photographs to illustrate Allen Eaton’s Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands (1937). Ulmann’s process and aesthetics, which used outdated glass plate negatives and the Pictorialist style, produced an anachronistic view of her Appalachian subjects. Ulmann printed her work as platinum prints, which further connected her with earlier “fine art” photography, while at the same time suggesting a disjuncture between her working-class subjects and the use of the platinum print for high-end portraiture. While undergoing her research on Ulmann, however, the author unearthed a previously unknown personal connection to Doris Ulmann’s work from Brasstown. This article posits that through an engagement with the materiality of photography — and especially, through the enduring beauty of the platinum print — we might reconsider the way photography acts on us: that Barthes’ punctum is not only a specter that haunts us, but a physical, corporeal tie to our past.