Pictorial Photography in Americaand in the journal
Photo-Era.
A lover of the theater and an avid reader, Ul-
mann often sought out actors and writers and other
personalities whose work impressed her and invited
them back to her Park Avenue apartment in order
to make their portraits. Thus she is also known for
her portraits of celebrities, especially writers and
poets, including Sinclair Lewis, Robert Frost, and
Edna St. Vincent Millay and actors Lillian Gish
and Paul Robeson.
In 1925, Ulmann began a series of photographs of
Shaker and Mennonite communities in Virginia. It
was around this time that she first met John Jacob
Niles, a musician and folklorist from Kentucky.
Ulmann eventually hired Niles to work as her assis-
tant when she began the project of documenting the
social and religious customs of people of the back-
woods of the Appalachian Highlands. In the sum-
mers of 1933 and 1934, the year of her premature
death, she shot thousands of negatives of people,
crafts, and landscapes to illustrate Allen Eaton’s
landmark book on crafts of the southern highlands.
Besides her Appalachian photographs, Ulmann
is perhaps best known for her work documenting
the descendents of slaves, who isolated on South
Carolina’s coastal islands, had developed a unique
culture, called Gullah. In 1929, Ulmann met the
writer Julia Peterkin, who invited Ulmann to come
to her family plantation in South Carolina with the
idea of making photographs for her book about the
Gullah culture titledRoll, Jordan, Roll. This work
became a classic of ethnographic documentary
photography.
Ulmann usually contact-printed her negatives
and made platinum prints, which provided the
rich shadows and soft, graduated tonalities that
are typical features of her work. At the time of
her death in 1934, however, thousands of negatives
were left unprinted, but the Doris Ulmann Foun-
dation, established through her estate, hired a
photographer, S.H. Lifshey, to make proof prints
in order that her work be preserved for future gene-
rations. Her work is now housed at Berea College
in Kentucky.
Major holdings of Ulmann’s photographs can be
found in numerous institutions including: The New
York Historical Society, The University of Oregon
Library (Eugene), The Los Angeles County Mu-
seum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, The
University of Kentucky Library (Lexington), the
Historic New Orleans Collection, The Museum of
Fine Arts (Boston), The Schomburg Center for
Research in Black Culture of the New York Public
Library, Duke University Library (Durham, North
Carolina), the North Carolina Division of Archives
and History, and the International Museum of
Photography at the George Eastman House (Ro-
chester, New York).
LoriPauli
Seealso: Photography in the United States: the
South; Pictorialism; Portraiture; White, ClarenceBiography
Born in New York, 29 May, 1882. Attended Ethical Culture
School, Columbia University, and the Clarence White
School of Photography. Portfolio of photographs titled
The Faculty of the College of Physicians and Surgeons,
Columbia Universitypublished 1919.A Book of Portraits
of the Medical Faculty of the Johns Hopkins University
published 1922.A Portrait Gallery of American Editors,
published 1925. Annual trips to photograph Appala-
chian Highlands, 1928–1934.Roll, Jordan, Roll, a book
about African-American life and primarily the Gullah
people of South Carolina, made in collaboration with
the writer Julia Peterkin, published 1933. Died in New
York City, 28 August, 1934.Individual Exhibitions
1929 Delphic Studios; New York, New York
1933 Delphic Studios; New York, New York
1934 Berea College; Berea, Kentucky
1934 Library of Congress; Washington, D.C.
1974 Witkin Gallery; New York, New York
1974 Museum of Art, University of Oregon; Eugene, Oregon
1976 Western Carolina University; Cullowhee, North Carolina
1976 G. Ray Hawkins Gallery; Los Angeles, California
1977 Doris Ulmann 1884–1934, A Survey of Her Life’s Work in
Photography; Marcuse Pfeifer Gallery, New York, New York
1983 Doris Ulmann: Cultural Documents 1917–1934; San Fran-
cisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California
1985 American Portraits; Friends of Photography, Carmel,
California
1986 Doris Ulmann; International Museum of Photography,
George Eastman House; Rochester, New York
1996 Doris Ulmann: Photography and Folklore;J.PaulGetty
Museum; Los Angeles, California
2001 Doris Ulmann’s Passionate Portraits of America; Hope-
well Museum; Paris, Kentucky
2002 Doris Ulmann and the Crafters of Northwestern Caro-
lina; Asheville Art Museum; Asheville, North Carolina
2003 Movers and Makers: Doris Ulmann’s Portrait of the
Craft Revival in Appalachia; History Museum of Wes-
tern Virginia; Charleston, West VirginiaGroup Exhibitions
1917 An Exhibition of Pictorial Photography by American Art-
ists, Pictorial Photographers of America; Minneapolis
Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, Minnesota
1919 Sixth Annual Pittsburgh Salon of Photography; Pitts-
burgh Academy of Science and Art, Photographic Sec-
tion, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (also
1920, 1922, 1923, 1925)ULMAN, DORIS