Portrait of Doris Ulmann

Abstract

SPECIAL FEATURE Portrait of Doris Ulmann Leatha Kendrick Doris Ulmann (1882-1934) was born and educated in New York City. Trained as a teacher at the school of the Ethical Culture Society, Doris was in Law School at Columbia University, when in 1914 she visited a photography class taught by Clarence White, a famous pictorialist photographer. Abruptly she left Columbia to enter the newly founded White School of Photography in New York and soon discovered her talent for portraiture and embarked on what was to be her life's work. By the mid-1920s she was in demand as a studio portrait photographer, and, by the end of the decade, she had published three volumes of portraits. Picasso claimed that he was quoting Leonardo da Vinci when he asserted, "the painter always paints himself." Ulmann's portraits reveal at least as much about who she is as they do about the people she photographed. Though Sherwood Anderson, Robert Frost, Thomas Wolfe, Paul Robeson, Albert Einstein, and many other famous people were glad to sit for her, Ulmann was drawn to people on the margins of society. In the late 1920s she began to leave her comfortable Park Avenue apartment more and more regularly, looking for groups of people whose rural way of life she feared was quickly passing away. Her first published Appalachian photographs appeared in June 1928 in Scribner's magazine. In the last two years of her life she began documenting rural artisans in the Appalachians for Allen Eaton's landmark study, Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands, published in 1937, three years after her death. It is no accident that Doris Ulmann took on such a project: her father amassed great wealth as a textile importer. An immigrant from Bavaria, Bernhard Ulmann was an idealistic man who took personal interest in his workers and contributed to the Ethical Culture Society, a socially liberal organization that championed individual worth regardless of ethnic or economic background. His daughter's New York portraits were masterful. Her Appalachian subjects were alive. Doris lived an unconventional life—divorcing her husband and traveling with male friends, hiring John Jacob Niles as her personal assistant partly because she liked having him around and partly because she had a habit of supporting artists in any way she could, whether it was by taking their portraits or collaborating on books or sending them money from time to time. Making Niles her assistant offered her not only a strong back to carry her heavy photographic gear but also a chance to support an artist who was collecting traditional mountain music. Wherever they went together, she saw to it that Niles had a chance to perform his music and to collect ballads. Even if she were able to photograph interesting artisans, she did not consider their trips a success if Niles did not find significant music to collect. Though Doris Ulmann is remembered for her photographs, she was also an important part of the music that Niles collected and transformed in his performances. Without her financial support, he would not have been able to do this work. Some argue that Ulmann's photographs play into the perpetuation of racial and regional stereotypes. The portraits reveal not only her respect for the people she photographed but also her romanticizing of them to a certain degree. By excluding the popular culture of the time, the most up-to-date—and thus, eventually dated—consumer goods, Ulmann's photographs achieve a timelessness. Is she implying that the mountain people live somehow outside time? Partly. Does this mean that they were out of touch with modern culture? Some of them were. But the fact that Ulmann's photographs show old mountain men holding newspapers and books, as well as hand tools, undercuts the idea that she felt these people were out of touch with the larger world. Her portraits partake of the timelessness of all great art: in the same sense that Rembrandt's portraits do not become "dated," neither do Ulmann's photographs. In this sense, the timelessness of her portraits rebukes stereotyping. Doris Ulmann was a gentle person who believed in the dignity of manual labor and in the innate beauty...