Doris Ulmann (1884–1934) traveled with singer
and traditional folksong collector John Jacob
Niles from New York to Kentucky, Tennessee,
and North Carolina to photograph the people liv-
ing in the Appalachian Mountains. She then went
on to the South Carolina coast to photograph the
Gullah people living on Pulitzer Prize-winning
author Julia Peterkin’s Lang Syne Plantation.
Combining the platinum process of the Pictorial
style with an honest documentary approach, Ul-
mann sought to photographically preserve the cul-
ture, originally from Liberia, whose world was fast
vanishing with growing urbanization. In 1933, a
year before Ulmann’s death, a collection of these
images was included in Peterkin’s bookRoll, Jor-
dan, Roll.
A romanticized view of the South was also seen
in the work of Bayard Morgan Wooten (1875–
1959). Wooten ventured into the Appalachian
Mountains in North Carolina, choosing to focus
on the mountain people, log cabins, their handi-
crafts, and idyllic way of life. Two of the six books
published with Wooten’s images are Backwoods
America(1934) and Cabins in the Laurel(1935,
reprint 1991).Backwoods Americacontains photo-
graphs taken in North Carolina with the text writ-
ten by Charles Morrow Wilson about Arkansas
and Missouri. Muriel Sheppard’s words inCabins
in the Laurelmore directly correlate to Wooten’s
North Carolina images.
Images of the South made in the 1930s, primarily
the vernacular representations of the region in
books such as Erskine Caldwell’s book,Tobacco
Road(1932) and Margaret Mitchell’s (and movie),
Gone With the Wind, became what shaped the
national perception of the South in the twentieth
century. The South of popular imagination as a
place of abandoned homes, neglected homesteads,
and rural poverty shaped a lasting impression of
Southern life. Contributing to these common per-
ceptions as well were the visual constructs of the
published documentary photographs made by the
United States government’s Farm Security Admin-
istration (FSA) and Works Progress Administra-
tion (WPA) in the 1930s. The classic work of
Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Marion Post Wol-
cott, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee, Carl Mydans, and
Jack Delano visually reinforced the popular South-
ern literary themes. From 1935–1938 under the
FSA, Evans recorded the effect of the Great
Depression on Southern farms and on industrial
towns in West Virginia. His best known images
were produced in James Agee’sLet Us Now Praise
FamousMen (1941), a study of three sharecropper
families in Hale County, the heart of Alabama’s
rich cotton land. Wolcott, also working under the
FSA (1938–1941), sought to use photography in a
more socially influential way by focusing upon
rural life, the migrant labor conditions, such as
overcrowding and the children, and contrasts
between the affluent and the poor. Mydans, as-
signed to photograph the Alabama cotton fields
(1935–1936), documented the rural agrarian pov-
erty. Working with sociologist Arthur Raper in
1941, Jack Delano’s telling photographs of the
black people in Green County, Georgia, were pub-
lished inTenants of the Allmighty.
Throughout this time a few Southern photogra-
phers were working for the government in the
South. For the WPA, Eudora Welty traveled her
home state of Mississippi (1935–1936) as a publi-
city agent, discovering the poverty she had not seen
before. Calling her visual work ‘‘snapshots,’’ Welty
saw her subjects with a simple, gentle eye, record-
ing the moment or emotion in a manner similar to
her Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction. In the late 1930s
on behalf of the Federal Writers’ Project, Robert
McNeil (b. 1918) spent time documenting the lives
of African Americans in Virginia.
The government’s photographs of the South dur-
ing the 1930s became, for most Americans, how the
South ‘‘looked.’’ It has been proposed that the
underlying reason for the success of these Depres-
sion Era views is the reassurance felt by those out-
side the South during a difficult and uncertain time.
Nostalgic images of a simpler time in an agrarian
culture provided refuge from economic disparity.
There were, however, other projects outside of
the government programs, which also left lasting
cultural assumptions about the South. Independent
of any government controlled projects, Margaret
Bourke-White together with her future husband,
writer Erskine Caldwell, created a pioneer study
into rural poverty in the southern United States.
Her images and his words culminated in the book,
You Have Seen Their Faces(1937).
During the Depression, commercial and portrait
studios did not fare well. Barely able to support
himself, Michael Disfarmer (1884–1959) set up a
makeshift studio in Heber Springs, Arkansas,
doing full length simple portraits of the local
small town people.
After the Great Depression and World War II,
photographers began to see the region as both a
place to make their art and to document. Working
in New Orleans since 1936, and after World War II
supporting himself as a freelance architectural pho-
tographer, native Louisianan Clarence John Laugh-
lin dwelt upon the history and mythology of the
South for nearly 50 years in his personal work.UNITED STATES: THE SOUTH, PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE