Doris Ulmann

Stairway, South, 1920

Doris Ulmann Biography

Doris Ulmann (b. 1882, New York) was educated at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School and went on to study psychology and law at Columbia University's Teachers College, where she came under the instruction of photographer Clarence H. White, a founding member of Alfred Stieglitz's Photo-Secession and a leading figure of the Pictorialist movement. When White founded his own school, the Clarence H. White School of Photography, in 1914, Ulmann enrolled and pursued photography with new seriousness, joining the Pictorial Photographers of America, an organization she co-founded with her then-husband, orthopedic surgeon Dr. Charles H. Jaeger, himself a Pictorialist photographer. By 1918 Ulmann had turned to portraiture as her primary focus, using her Park Avenue apartment as a studio to photograph members of New York's literary, artistic, and scientific elite-figures including William Butler Yeats, Albert Einstein, Martha Graham, Anna Pavlova, and Paul Robeson.

Beginning around 1925, Ulmann turned increasingly to the rural cultures of the southeastern United States, traveling beyond New York to photograph Dunkard, Mennonite, and Shaker communities. By the late 1920s she was making regular summer trips into the Southern Highlands of the Appalachian Mountains and the Gullah communities of coastal South Carolina, creating portraits of the residents. In 1933 she contributed photographs to Roll, Jordan, Roll, novelist Julia Peterkin's book about the vanishing Gullah culture of the South Carolina islands and coast. In collaboration with the 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 worked with a 6½ x 8½-inch, tripod-mounted view camera-even as the lightweight, hand-held camera grew more prevalent-paired with a soft-focus portrait lens, and favored platinum printing for its long tonal range and matte, velvety surface. The muted, warm tonality of the platinum print was a gentle complement to her respectful, sympathetic portrayals of subjects whose lives differed from her own. Roughly half of the 304 matted prints in her primary archive, held at the University of Oregon, are platinum prints personally mounted and signed by Ulmann.