Roll, Jordan, Roll and the Gullah photographs of Doris Ulmann

Abstract

As early as 1929 Doris Ulmann undertook a project to create a book of pictorial studies of African-Americans in the South. Through her friendship with novelist Julia Peterkin (figure 1), who eventually wrote its text, this book project evolved into Roll, Jordan, Roll (1933), which describes the religious life and community of the Gullah, a group of people of African descent living in the coastal areas of South Carolina and Georgia. Through an exploration of this publication and the relationship between its text and images, it becomes clear that Ulmann's photographs should be considered as artworks that function independendy of the text. This independence is emphasized by Ulmann's employment of a soft focus which underscores the fine art nature of her photographs. Furthermore, a group of letters written by Peterkin, whom Ulmann met at a literary gathering in 1929,1 offers new insight into the conception of Roll, Jordan, Roll, and substantiates the attribution of the original idea for the book to Ulmann. By the time she began photographing African-Americans in the South, and specifically the Gullahs of Peterkin's Lang Syne Plantation, Doris Ulmann had become famous for her series of porttaits depicting people in the Appalachian region of the United States. She was praised for the ability to invest her subjects with dignity and self-respect in the face of the economic hardships they endured. One critic noted that, ‘There is nothing forced or fantastic or affected in her work. ... Her work is plain, straightforward, sympathetic and wholesome’.2 Ulmann said that she preferred photographing people whose faces showed that they had been touched by life. She stated, ‘A face that has the marks of having lived intensely, that expresses some phase of life, some dominant quality or intellectual power, constitutes for me an interesting face’.3