Doris Ulmann (née le 29 mai 1882 à New York où elle est morte le 28 août 1934 (à 52 ans)) était une photographe américaine.
Doris Ulmann took thousands of photographs in Appalachia, creating the largest photographic record of the region.
Between 1927 and 1934 Ulmann photographed Appalachia to capture the character of people whom she admired, and feared were disappearing from the American scene.
Most of the images in our Appalachian exhibits were made by Ulmann during the summers of 1933-34. They are some of the over 3,100 images of people, crafts, and landscapes taken to illustrate Allen Eaton's landmark book on crafts of the southern highlands.
A New Yorker by birth, Doris Ulmann preserved the rural cultures of the southeastern United States through her photographs. She worked particularly in the "Southern Highlands" of the Appalachian Mountains, creating portraits of the residents. In 1933, she contributed photographs to Roll, Jordan, Roll, a book by novelist Julia Peterkin about the vanishing black culture, known as Gullah, of the South Carolina islands and coastal areas. In collaboration with musician, actor, and folklorist John Jacob Niles, she made what Niles called annual "folklore and photographic expeditions" to the Southern Highlands between 1928 and 1934.
Ulmann's equipment was somewhat cumbersome and old-fashioned for her time. She most often used a 6½ x 8½ inch, tripod-mounted view camera, although the lightweight, hand-held camera was more prevalent, and she produced soft-focus platinum prints. The muted, warm tonality of the platinum image was a gentle complement to her respectful, sympathetic portrayals of subjects whose lives were different from her own.
Her work was exhibited in various New York galleries, and published in Theatre Arts Monthly, Mentor, Scribner's Magazine, and Survey Graphic. In 1922 Johns Hopkins University published her Book of Portraits of the Medical Faculty of the Johns Hopkins University; in 1925 Rudge issued A Portrait Gallery of American Editors, and in 1933, Ballou published (in various editions) Roll, Jordan Roll, the text by Julia Peterkin.
In an interview with Dale Warren of Bookman Doris Ulmann referred to her particular interest in portraits. "The faces of men and women in the street are probably as interesting as literary faces, but my particular human angle leads me to men and women who write. I am not interested exclusively in literary faces, because I have been more deeply moved by some of my mountaineers than by any literary person. 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. For this reason the face of an older person, perhaps not beautiful in the strictest sense, is usually more appealing than the face of a younger person who has scarcely been touched by life." ("Doris Ulmann: Photographer-in-waiting," Bookman, 72, 129-144.)
Trained as a pictorialist by Clarence White, Ulmann's early work includes a series of portraits of prominent intellectuals, artists and writers: William Butler Yeats, John Dewey, Max Eastman, Sinclair Lewis, Lewis Mumford, Joseph Wood Krutch, Martha Graham, Anna Pavlova, Paul Robeson, and Lillian Gish. In 1932 Ulmann began her most important series, assembling documentation of Appalachian folk arts and crafts for Allen Eaton's 1937 book, Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands. From 1927, Ulmann was assisted on her rural travels by John Jacob Niles, a musician and folklorist who collected ballads while Ulmann photographed. Doris Ulmann died August 28, 1934.
