Seeing America: Women Photographers between the Wars

by Melissa A. McEuen

Overview

Seeing America explores the camera work of five women who directed their visions toward influencing social policy and cultural theory. Taken together, they visually articulated the essential ideas occupying the American consciousness in the years between the world wars.

Melissa McEuen examines the work of Doris Ulmann, who made portraits of celebrated artists in urban areas and lesser-known craftspeople in rural places; Dorothea Lange, who magnified human dignity in the midst of poverty and unemployment; Marion Post Wolcott, a steadfast believer in collective strength as the antidote to social ills and the best defense against future challenges; Margaret Bourke-White, who applied avant-garde advertising techniques in her exploration of the human condition; and Berenice Abbott, a devoted observer of the continuous motion and chaotic energy that characterized the modern cityscape.

Combining feminist biography with analysis of visual texts, McEuen considers the various prisms though which each woman saw and revealed America. Their documentary photographs were the result of personal visions that had been formed by experiences and emotions as well as by careful calculations and technological processes. These photographers captured the astounding variety of occupations, values, and leisure activities that shaped the nation, and their photographs illuminate the intricate workings of American culture in the 1920s and 1930s.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813190945
Publisher:	University Press of Kentucky
Publication date:	11/01/2004
Pages:	376
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Melissa McEuen is an assistant professor of history at Transylvania University.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Documentarian
with Props

DORIS ULMANN'S VISION
OF AN IDEAL AMERICA

One picture ... cannot express an individual.

—Doris Ulmann

A few weeks before her death at age fifty-two, Doris Ulmann wrote, "Personally, I think there is always more value in doing one thing thoroughly and as well as possible than in spreading over a large area and getting just a little of many things." The specific reference was to her current photography project, but the statement also clearly defined the approach she had taken in her twenty years behind the camera. Spending hours with each subject, posing and reposing, Ulmann ultimately created a composite image of the person or object on which she focused. Her method of painstakingly observing each portrait sitter remained the hallmark of her in-depth studies. Beginning as a photographer who posed wealthy, educated, and privileged individuals in New York City, she later broadened her focus to create images of rural Americans. She chose ethnically distinctive enclaves that interested her and carefully studied individuals within those groups. Combining an interest in human psychology, a nostalgia for an idealized American past, and the finest available training in photography, Ulmann produced some of the most penetrating character studies of Americans in the 1920s and 1930s.

    That she realized her portraits could serve a social purpose places her squarely within the documentary tradition of American photography. She reached this conclusion wellpast the midpoint of her career, embarking upon new and extensive projects despite debilitating physical frailties. Although her style and her equipment remained virtually unchanged for twenty years, Ulmann's camera eye shifted significantly three times: in 1919, when the hint of publishing success ensured her status as a professional photographer; in the mid-1920s, after her marriage legally ended, her mentor died, and she suffered a crippling fall; and in 1933, when she began a comprehensive survey of southern Appalachian handicrafts to illustrate a colleague's written text on the subject. At each juncture Ulmann embraced subjects that she felt deserved the attention of the public and, most of all, required a photographer's interpretative eye (her own) to grasp and hold that attention. The faces and scenes she rendered reflect her desire to create photographic records that not only would illuminate personalities and lifestyles but also would expose ideal worlds—worlds created by the good intentions and active imaginations of Ulmann and her upper-middle-class counterparts. Their interests led them to grapple with the myriad changes wrought by a modern, industrialized, and increasingly urbanized nation.

    Ulmann's family background and educational pursuits set the stage for the work she found most satisfying as a professional photographer. She was born in 1882 into a wealthy Jewish family, her father having immigrated to the United States from Bavaria in the 1860s. Supported by a successful textile manufacturing business, the Ulmann family lived in New York City's heart, Manhattan. The urban environment provided the cosmopolitan influences that shaped Ulmann's initial aesthetic tastes and values. She cultivated many interests that she would continue to enjoy for the rest of her life, from literature to theater to modern dance. Her New York public school education was supplemented by excursions abroad with her father, Bernhard Ulmann. In 1900 she enrolled in teacher training at the Ethical Culture School, an institution founded by Felix Adler, who was an optimistic reformer driven by humanistic impulses and a great need to sponsor and help the burgeoning working classes. His progressive institution functioned according to the Ethical Culture Society's motto, "Deed not creed," thus setting it apart from other contemporary reform efforts that were heavily infused with religious messages and influences. The Ethical Culture School appealed to several constituencies, including successful immigrants seeking to Americanize their children and provide them with a living conscience sufficient to embrace problems posed by the new industrial order in the United States.

    With hopes of becoming an educator, Ulmann spent four years at Ethical Culture, during the same period that a young teacher named Lewis Hine went there to teach biology. At the insistence of the school's superintendent, Hine ended up taking students on several field trips to Ellis Island to photograph newly arrived immigrants. He also began offering lessons in photography, where Ulmann probably had her first contact with him. Their mutual devotion to Ethical Culture's philosophies gave them common ground on which to build their respective photographic achievements. For Hine, the task began almost immediately, as he published both words and pictures addressing society's problems. For Ulmann, the reform impulse lay dormant for nearly twenty years, awakening when she realized that her camera work could transcend its status as a hobby and could make a difference in distinctive communities in the United States. To accomplish her goals, she embraced an element of Hine's approach that had become one of the hallmarks of his socially charged visual images: a focus upon individual faces, not the masses. Hine portrayed dignity in his subjects, despite their horrid living and working conditions in mills and mines and sweatshops. Connecting people intimately with their work, especially that accomplished by their hands, Hine created portraits that bespoke his appreciation for individual laborers. Ulmann's photography in Appalachia and the Deep South in the 1920s and 1930s mirrored Hine's imagery in its emphasis on the individual life, the character of manual labor, and the maintenance of human dignity.

    But long before she created the photographs that made her famous, Ulmann spent several years studying. Columbia University proved to be a significant influence in Ulmann's young adulthood. Here she pursued the two subjects that would direct her life's work, psychology and photography; here also she met Dr. Charles Jaeger, the man she eventually married. Ulmann's attraction to psychology, a relatively new social science, led her to pursue a teaching career at Teachers College, Columbia University. She joined hundreds of single young women who filled the social science departments at major universities in the early twentieth century. Their interests in philosophy and pedagogy, particularly educational psychology, caused them to seek vocational avenues where their scholarship could be directly applied. Many of these women became teachers or ran urban settlement houses or rural settlement schools, carving out socially acceptable careers for themselves as independent women working alone or in single-sex groups. Although Ulmann never pursued those vocations, she later became closely acquainted with a number of women who did.

    While a student at Columbia, Ulmann also took courses in law, but she developed such a distaste for the field that she abandoned it after one term. She felt that "a welter of legal technicalities" smothered the human element. In 1914 Ulmann began serious study of photography at Teachers College with the acclaimed instructor Clarence H. White. She had already taken a few classes with White soon after he arrived in New York City, but her true dedication to the art form began in 1914. She joined a legion of students under White's mentorship, many of them women who later enjoyed high-profile careers as professional photographers, including Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, and Laura Gilpin. Ulmann, known as one of White's "most devoted pupils," later taught at the master's photography school. Given the time and energy she put into developing her art, it seems unusual that Ulmann claimed to have taken up photography as "an excuse for doing something with her hands when her mind was tired." But she was known to suffer from any number of simultaneous physical ailments, including stomach ulcers (which she had developed as a child), arthritic pain, and a general nervousness that led her to seek solace in activities that would calm her. Her physical weaknesses combined with society's expectations of a woman reared in the nineteenth-century bourgeois tradition kept Ulmann from venturing out too far away from her Manhattan home with her camera. But these limitations would soon be eased by the companions she cultivated. In 1915 Ulmann's professional interests and personal interests intersected. She married orthopedic surgeon Charles Jaeger, who was a friend and physician of Clarence White, an instructor of orthopedic surgery at Columbia University, and himself a photography buff.

    Because of their shared interest in photography, husband and wife often traveled to picturesque settings—coastal villages in Maine, Massachusetts, and the Carolinas—with hopes of finding appropriate subject matter for their respective visual studies. The two soon became active leaders in the Pictorial Photographers of America, a group that continued a forty-year-old tradition of creating naturalist-inspired scenes altered by manipulations in the darkroom. At the turn of the century, pictorialism had been supported by gallery owner and photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who served as the inspiration for a number of artists and artistic movements. One of those movements was a branch of pictorialism called Photo-Secession, whose practitioners, such as Clarence H. White, sought to create symbolic art. Stieglitz believed photography should be considered an art and nothing more, an end in itself, certainly not an extension of the muckraking journalists' stories designed to arouse social change. So at the same time Lewis Hine shaped his style employing the camera for reform purposes, Stieglitz had initiated a movement in New York that sought to keep the camera from becoming such an instrument. These were the preeminent standards and approaches in American photography at the time Ulmann was developing her own camera eye.

    These two powerful forces in photography—the reform impulse of Lewis Hine and the artistic-pictorialist focus of Alfred Stieglitz and Clarence H. White—are clearly traceable in Ulmann's aesthetic sense. She did not claim to have copied any particular photographic style, but the dominant philosophies of the era are revealed in the thousands of images that make up the Ulmann oeuvre. Reflecting the standards set by Hine's work, Ulmann focused on the unknown individual whom society judged more often by ethnic, religious, or economic affiliations than by personal merits. In a 1917 study she initially titled The Back Stairs but later recast as The Orphan (fig. 1), Ulmann captured a small, dark-haired child amid the symbols of urban poverty. The child plays barefooted among broken stones, discarded wood pieces, and other debris. Additional messages about the child's existence may be detected in the rickety rail accompanying the stairs to her home and the empty barrel she leans on. Despite the instability and emptiness characteristic of the child's environment, Ulmann portrays her as an angelic figure—a tender face in profile, her tiny body robed in white play clothes made brighter by the natural light. A certain universality in the child's forlorn look, much like a paper-cut silhouette, ensures her status as an innocent in the midst of social disarray.

    Like Hine, Ulmann eschewed evaluation according to the group standard, although she did find individuals in certain groups more fascinating to photograph than those in others. Among the groups she studied early in her career were physicians at Columbia University and writers in New York City; she later expanded her examination of groups to include fishermen in Massachusetts, Dunkards in Pennsylvania, Shakers in New York, mountaineers in Appalachia, Gullah African Americans in South Carolina, and Creoles in New Orleans. Seeking out particular "types" that could be categorized, Ulmann proceeded to isolate particular individuals within a community who possessed intriguing physical characteristics or who worked at unusual occupations. That was a practice not uncommon in the early twentieth century; Lewis Hine had selected extraordinary persons from bands of workers and ethnic groups to propel his arguments about the need for labor reform.

    From the Stieglitz association's artistic philosophy, a viewpoint seemingly adversarial to that of Hine, Ulmann co-opted ideas she could assimilate into her own aesthetic. The sensorial appeals achieved by the early pictorialists' romantic imagery also pervaded Ulmann's photographs. The relationship between soft backgrounds and sharply defined foreground foci allowed for a play of textures that remained the single most continuous thread in Ulmann's images throughout her years as a professional photographer. She began her photographic studies with the requisite nature scenes that pictorialists often sought. In one 1917 experiment with light and shadows, Ulmann focused on a barren tree without leaves, its branches and its spindly, dark shadow set against a white building. Other similar treatments of trees, architectural structures, clouded skies, and snowy landscapes are representative of Ulmann's early pictorialist-inspired vision. In one composition (fig. 2), gradations of light combined with myriad textures to form the sensory depths of the photograph, from the softly focused leaves in the lower left section of the frame to the harder lines of the main vine. Geometric patterns are emphasized as the vertical plane is determined by the strongest vine trunk, which divides the frame. The smaller arm cuts across the horizontal plane of the photograph, and the planks on the wooden structure provide subtle reminders that balance has been achieved in these perpendicular relations. Ulmann continued throughout her career to seek the play of light and dark and shades of gray in similar natural settings and in her portraiture. A photograph taken in the late teens or early twenties and entered in a local exhibition was a picturesque landscape she entitled "III Clouds over the Mountain." Her choice of subject matter and textual characteristics reflect the influence of Stieglitz's approach. Clouds were a subject that Stieglitz had obsessively embraced during World War I. To further emphasize her attachment to this particular artistic philosophy and style, Ulmann joined no other photography collectives but the local pictorialist group and the Pittsburgh Salon of Photography. She generally avoided camera clubs, unions, and similar groups, even though she lived in a city that boasted the most exciting photography community in the nation and, perhaps, the world.

    As a student and friend of Clarence White's, Ulmann drew ideas from the Photo-Secession movement, which suggested that one had to assume the mantle of "artist" in order to create art with a camera. Ulmann inculcated this idea, believing herself an artist and thus carrying out many of the same processes a person working with canvas and brush had to master. Nowhere was this more evident than in her oil pigment printing, a method requiring careful brush strokes of lithographic ink on water-soaked prints. Since no two oil pigment prints were exactly alike, they were more like paintings than most photographic prints produced in the 1920s. Although David Featherstone has suggested that Ulmann accumulated "raw sociological data," her finished prints reveal an artistry that transcends mere collection of evidence. She employed light to its fullest effect, sought figured shadows, and focused on patterns, objects, hands, and faces. But these constituted only a portion of her work. The painstaking printing processes Ulmann performed required as much time and manipulation as her choice and recording of subjects. It is this conscious creation and re-creation of her subject matter in the darkroom that keeps her work from constituting simply a mass of empirical data on which historians or other observers can hang hypotheses about particular subcultures in the United States. Those seeking to use her photographs as clear windows through which to view American culture must consider Ulmann's self-professed biases and her conscious deliberation over positioning subjects and using props. From her earliest work in the portrait studio, she sought complete control over her attempts to "express an individual."

In 1919 Ulmann published her initial work as a professional photographer, a handsome portfolio entitled Twenty-Four Portraits of the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University. As Mrs. Charles Jaeger, she had gained entrance into the prestigious circle of physicians to which her husband belonged. In the years immediately following, she developed a reputation as an outstanding portraitist. In 1922 her second major collection, A Book of Portraits of the Medical Faculty of Johns Hopkins University, was published in Baltimore. A marked difference in the publication information recorded in these two collections suggests Ulmann's direction on a path independent of her husband. The author listing she chose for the 1919 Columbia University collection was "Mrs. Doris U. Jaeger," the signature she had most commonly used on her early prints. By 1922 she had begun to use her family name, Ulmann, on her published work and on her exhibition prints. The exhibition entry entitled "III Clouds over the Mountain" reveals her new professional name, along with her impressive studio address—Doris Ulmann, 1000 Park Avenue, New York City. To sever her past ties with Jaeger, Ulmann returned to some of her early prints and erased the original signature that bore his name, replacing it with the name she had reclaimed. Even though they had studied photography together and had been prime motivators behind the local Pictorial Photographers of America chapter, Ulmann sought to strike out on her own. Her act of wiping out her husband's name implies her dedication to a life and profession not only separate from his but also not tainted by her previous relationship to him. However, her title remained vague. She rarely used one on letters, notes, or prints, but her principal traveling companion in later life, John Jacob Niles, referred to her as "Miss Doris Ulmann." Ulmann's brother-in-law, Henry Necarsulmer, insisted after her death that although she had divorced her husband and resumed her family name, she had been married and thus "was known as Mrs. Doris Ulmann." Even in the early 1930s, a divorced woman traveling hundreds of miles in rural America with a male companion, especially one of whom her family did not approve, was inconsistent with the demands of upper-class New York social circles. In Ulmann we see a complex woman whose quiet demeanor and upper-crust sophistication were matched by a need to exert personal control over her present, her past, and even her legacy.

    The two published books of physicians' portraits provide the necessary clues to understanding Ulmann's use of her skills as a photographer and her need to control her work. With these collections Ulmann exhibited a strong desire to assume and complete whole projects, comprehensive surveys focused on particular ends. These projects set the stage for future work by giving her a taste of the kind of material she would find most satisfying throughout her career as a professional photographer—theme-centered studies, built on extensive series of images rather than on a single mesmerizing frame. Outside the portrait studio, Ulmann's meticulous examinations of groups and communities helped her shape her niche in photography. One of her more thorough early examinations of a particular place and people—the fishing village of Gloucester, Massachusetts—included scenes of boats, pier buildings, equipment for the trade, and the characters who made their living on the sea.

    As a result of Ulmann's drive to embrace complete projects, she carried out each step of the photographic process herself. She handled the glass plates, mixed the chemicals, developed the negatives, made the prints, and mounted the finished photographs. And she preferred to keep her creative secrets to herself, allowing no one to assist or interrupt the magical process that unfolded in her darkroom, a converted bathroom. Only years later, after her health seriously deteriorated, did she allow anyone to help her in the darkroom. She even refused to allow other eyes to view her proofs, explaining, "I see my finished print in the proof ... but I cannot expect others to see anything beyond what the proof presents. I avoid retouching, but prints always require spotting before they are ready. I believe that I become better acquainted with my sitter while working at the pictures, because the various steps provide ample time for the most minute inspection and contemplation." The relationships Ulmann forged with her subjects through "the pictures" point to a theme in her otherwise solitary existence as a portrait photographer. The camera aided Ulmann with her shyness. She got to know those with whom she was most intrigued by studying them thoroughly through the lens. For one portrait sitting of a single individual, Ulmann would expose a tremendous number of glass plates. She recognized the complexity of human existence and felt that too few shots would simplify and ultimately distort a life. She believed one photograph could not define a person and so offered her sitters "twenty or thirty finished prints instead of the scant dozen or so proofs submitted by the craftiest of commercial photographers." In the process Ulmann gained a deeper understanding of people she admired by looking at two-dimensional renderings on glass plate negatives, not unlike the nineteenth-century phrenologists who determined character traits by measuring physical attributes prominent in visual depictions of famous politicians and military leaders. Systematic examination of Ulmann's photography reveals that she embraced several long-term projects that would allow her to revel in her infatuation with particular individuals.

    A fascination with the literary mind turned Ulmann's attention to writers, editors, and poets in the 1920s; it was an attraction that she fostered throughout her life, never turning completely away from the wordsmiths who so impressed her. She once told an interviewer, "The faces of the men and women in the street are probably just as interesting as literary faces, but my particular human angle leads me to the men and women who write." Her desire to capture penetrating and revealing images of literary figures points to her own love of literature and the word culture in which she had grown up. She reveled in language, read the German classics aloud, and, according to John Jacob Niles, spoke "flawless" English. From Ulmann's childhood to her young adult days, the American population's reliance upon words, not only for information but also for entertainment, had gradually waned. Visual images grew to dominate the messages promoted and delivered by both the public and the private sectors. During the Great War, posters urging support for the cause and "100% Americanism" employed compelling signs and symbols; and by the 1920s, advertising had reached a new height in its sophisticated use of pictures and graphic designs to convince consumers that buying the right products would ensure an easier or more enjoyable lifestyle. Ulmann's exposure to new educational trends and to advances in technology, including those in photography, helped her realize that the written culture was undergoing a radical transformation in the twentieth century. An avid reader, she attempted to sustain and illuminate the world of the literati by opening her apartment doors to a host of exciting American authors. In the same year that the First World War ended, she began taking professional photographic portraits, thus launching her career at a particularly crucial time for the arts and literature, so significant that it led the writer Gertrude Stein to note, "After the war we had the twentieth century." Meanwhile, Ulmann's reputation as a professional photographer grew with each passing year as she photographed many prominent writers, including H.L. Mencken, Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Carl Van Doren, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, James Weldon Johnson, Ellen Glasgow, and William Butler Yeats. Among these portraits were publishable images that prospective readers later saw on book jackets, in magazines, even in the Literary Guild of America's book club advertisements. Ulmann apparently tolerated and even enjoyed listening to a variety of opinions, given her selection of sitters who were decidedly modern and often confrontational voices of the 1920s.

    Ulmann developed a rudimentary understanding of her subjects, carefully observing mannerisms and gestures, long before she stood behind the tripod to study their faces. Dale Warren, himself an Ulmann subject, described the photographer's handling of a portrait session. She would serve cocktails and sweets and cigarettes, not solely for her subjects' enjoyment but to "draw [them] out." Warren intimated, "She studies your hands as you pass her a plate of cakes, observes which leg you cross over the other, notices the expression of your eyes, tells you a funny story to make you laugh, and another not so funny to see if you are easily reduced to tears." Ulmann even engaged her sitters in conversations that required them to articulate and defend their opinions. Brief responses were unacceptable to her, noted Warren. After isolating certain peculiarities in each individual, Ulmann built on these in her portraits. There was no one chair or single backdrop or unique angle she preferred. Faces mattered most, with hands nearly as important. The authors Ulmann photographed could choose from a limited collection of props she kept in her Upper East Side apartment-studio. A fountain pen, pads of writing paper, or various sizes and types of books satisfied most of them. But exceptions kept Ulmann and her household staff busy—Robert Frost, who never worked at a table, requested a wooden writing board; and E.V. Lucas, the prolific British essayist, demanded an inkwell instead of the fountain pen that his portraitist offered.

    Patient, gracious, and soft-spoken, Ulmann accommodated her subjects to a certain degree, hoping to create "bonds of sympathy" with them. She claimed to have allowed a few individuals to direct the day's events if they wished, but her desire to manage the portrait process is revealed in her fond recollection of a session at Sherwood Anderson's Virginia home: "I arrived at ten o'clock in the morning and did not leave until after midnight. Certainly no photographer could ask for a more interesting subject than Mr. Anderson, nor could anyone have put himself more completely in my power. He even led me to his clothes closet and asked me to look over his suits and choose the one I wanted him to wear."

    Ulmann preferred to direct a portrait sitting to this extent. And into the 1920s, as she grew increasingly confident in her abilities as an artist, she wielded greater control over her subjects. Her dominant hand in the positioning of heads and upper torsos is present throughout the bulk of her portraiture. Because she abhorred artificial light, with few exceptions her arrangements are determined by the available light from open windows or doors. Allowing sunlight to shine on her authors' faces, Ulmann disclosed her own reverence for those who were masters of language, moving their readers to anger or compassion or laughter. Sherwood Anderson, who bemoaned the barren nature of a society driven by industrialization, idealized rural life as simple and carefree, and therefore rich. Ulmann came to express similar ideas in her field photography in the early 1930s. The portraits she composed of Anderson show him sitting comfortably in front of a stone wall. One (reprinted on the cover of a 1958 journal issue featuring her photography) reveals a slightly rumpled Anderson. With his tie askew, a full inch off his starched shirt's placket, and his jacket gaping open over his crossed legs, he rests his right arm over the back of a straight chair. Anderson's demeanor is marked by carefully set lips and a furrowed brow, the latter probably due to the direct sunlight in which Ulmann positioned him. But his tanned skin reveals that his face has known days of sunlight, as much as any face of an ordinary Virginia farmer. Disheveled, Anderson's look suggests that he rarely dons a suit and tie and might prefer to be sitting instead in work clothes. At the very least, his outer trappings cannot shake his informality, sitting as he does slung back into the chair. Ulmann's positioning of Anderson makes him appear unassuming and nonthreatening, someone to be trusted, believed. By the end of the day, Ulmann had so thoroughly surveyed Anderson that he said, "I feel as if you are taking a part of me away with you."

    Ulmann's keen powers of observation and her hours spent with her sitters' portraits helped her to understand her subjects better, but in many cases she had read an author's works before the portrait appointment and so had made her initial acquaintance from the printed page. Never requesting money for her work, Ulmann sought compensation, if at all, in other ways. She preferred to receive a copy of a writer's latest book or a dedication inside her own personal edition. Her gracious letters to her sitters show that such rewards greatly satisfied her. To South Carolina writer and artist John Bennett, Ulmann expressed thanks for the "precious book" he sent to her; the "beautiful page" he illustrated and inscribed was "so delightfully done and so in harmony with the whole book." No bills or order forms or contract agreements accompanied an Ulmann portrait session. Independently wealthy, she never worried about money. She considered herself an artist, not a commissioned employee, and so refused to assume the role of court painter who made every subject appear beautiful or brilliant. She preferred that a subject's portraits "be worthy" of him or her, as she told John Bennett.

    People who came to Ulmann to be photographed frequently did so at her request, rather than their own. Her friend Olive Dame Campbell noted that Ulmann "rarely took a photograph unless interested in the sitter." She created images of writers so that she might forge relationships with those whom she admired; she often asked them to sign their portraits for her, next to her own signature, in essence sealing the relationship between herself and another artist and making it a matter of both personal satisfaction and public record. One such image Ulmann created of Elizabeth Madox Roberts, a Kentucky poet and novelist whose stories described customs and traditions of the Kentucky mountain people. In Ulmann's most stunning portrait of Roberts (fig. 3), she highlighted the author's hands. Set against a darkly draped background and a dark, nondescript dress, Roberts's left hand emerges at the end of her long arm to set the horizontal plane and thus the compositional stability of the photograph. Ulmann achieved the perpendicular balance by highlighting Roberts's graceful right hand. The long, slender fingers create the image's vertical line and, because they are slightly bent, hint at gentleness. Although she had done so with other writers, Ulmann chose not to put a pen or a book or manuscript pages in Roberts's hands, instead making the right hand itself the prominent feature in the portrait. Secondary in importance is the author's face, half-obscured by shadow on one side and adorned with a contemplative, yet comfortable expression. Ulmann relished studying masters of words like Roberts, those who were simultaneously reflecting and molding the American cultural landscape. And perhaps on a more personal level, Ulmann could appreciate the author's observations on romance. In Roberts's best-known work, My Heart and My Flesh (1927), a young woman attempts to find happiness in several different love affairs. Given her own discontent with her personal life and intimate liaisons in the early 1930s, Ulmann may easily have identified with the protagonist, appreciating Roberts's skills on an even deeper level than a mere literary observer would have.

    Perhaps nowhere is Ulmann's concern about the influence of writers more evident than in her 1925 publication A Portrait Gallery of American Editors. The proliferation of new magazines in the 1920s meant increased circulation of a variety of editorial opinions. Though an admirer, Ulmann also remained skeptical about some editors and the periodicals they produced. She prefaced her portrait collection with a sharp yet diplomatic statement about journals and those who controlled them, contending, "Magazines are so great a part of our daily life that almost unbeknown to us they mould our opinions and colour our views on most of the great problems of the day. Insidiously they have become a part of us and often times the views we hold as our own have in truth been formed by the editors of our favorite magazines. It is but natural that we should care to know what manner of men are these, who have thus formulated our ideas, coloured our thoughts and directed our perception of humour." She does not discuss the public's curiosity, or her own for that matter, to see merely what famous people look like. She drives at something deeper by pinpointing a desire to know "what manner of men are these." In this collection of forty-three images, Ulmann showed that her interests in psychology and portraiture were inextricably bound. Given her confidence that she could, as she told Dale Warren, "draw [individuals] out," Ulmann trusted that her psychological studies—the portraits—would reveal the layered complexities that made up each individual's personality and enable the American public to examine more closely the sources of their thinking. She warned viewers against being fooled by other visual images: "Personality and character are often so illusive, so intangible that they defy and escape the most seductive efforts of reproduction and instead of rendering a living likeness, little more than an anatomical copy is made." Ulmann intended for her portraits of these selected men and women to exceed such limited dimensions, by providing insight and lending definition to their influential lives. In her book, each editor's portrait carried alongside it an essay written by the editor, describing the nature of his or her work, but these were ancillary to the real purpose of the volume, an effort "to portray [the editor's] personality and something of their character by means of photographic portraits."

    Among those featured in A Portrait Gallery were Ellery Sedgwick of the Atlantic Monthly, Carl Van Doren of the Century, and Lawrence F. Abbott from the Outlook. Ulmann used four general poses for the collection. The most common one had the subject seated in a chair, holding an object in his or her hands, most often a cigarette, a book, or a sheaf of papers; a second pose or position had the subject seated behind a desk table and either attending to business or looking up from work. Twenty-seven of the forty-three portraits feature these positions, with attention given to the hands as well as the head of the editor. Richard Walsh, editor of Collier's, is viewed from his upper right side, so that the camera eye captures not only his face and upper torso, but also the page surface where he has previously directed his attention. The paper in his hand shows several lines of text that have been vigorously marked out by a well-sharpened pencil. The dark and light contrasts, charcoal scratches against white paper, provide Ulmann the aesthetic qualities she sought but also the story she wished to tell about Walsh's professional tasks. Her emphasis is on the aspect of manual labor required for this editor to fulfill his responsibilities. As in most of her survey projects on specific subjects, Ulmann connected individuals with the objects they touched and the work they accomplished with their hands. Whether a doctor with test tubes, a farmer with a scythe, a quilter with a T-square, or an artist with brushes, the subjects' hands play a prominent role in determining the quality of their work and thus in defining them.

    In the same year that A Portrait Gallery of American Editors appeared, Ulmann's career took an evolutionary turn. The change coincided with two events in her personal life—the legal dissolution of her decade-long marriage to Charles Jaeger and the sudden death of her mentor, Clarence White. The shift in Ulmann's photographic vision led her on a search that would require her to approach the men and women she most wished to photograph rather than summoning them to her Park Avenue studio, as she had become accustomed to doing. Ironically, this experimental phase with new subject matter that required greater travel manifested itself about the time Ulmann suffered a fall that temporarily immobilized her. The injury, a shattered knee cap, left Ulmann dependent upon a cane from 1926 on and, according to one friend, "colored the remainder of her life." As a result, she employed traveling companions and servants to escort her and help her move camera equipment from one shooting location to another. In spite of her losses, but more likely because of these significant changes in her personal life, Ulmann's career entered a new phase in the second half of the decade. The confining walls of the studio, treks to the New England coast to find picturesque landscapes, and strolls around Columbia University's campus gave way to the wide open spaces of the Carolina lowlands, hikes to southern Appalachian homesteads to find mountain handicrafts, and walks around the grounds of Berea College, the John C. Campbell Folk School, and several rural settlement schools.

    This second stage in Ulmann's photography career, marked by her physical impairment and by the absence of her mentor, allowed room for new mentors and companions to enter Ulmann's life. In cultivating close personal relationships with four of them, in particular, Ulmann merged her private life and personal needs with her professional goals. She met John Jacob Niles, a singer-actor who exchanged his self-proclaimed expertise as a "Kentucky backwoods-man" for Ulmann's financial support of his fledgling musical career. Ulmann also met Julia Peterkin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who lived in Fort Motte, South Carolina; Lyle Saxon, a Louisiana writer of romantic southern tales; and Olive Dame Campbell, a New Englander who spent most of her life running a folk school in Brasstown, North Carolina. Each new acquaintance helped Ulmann circulate through a specific American culture where she was able to gaze upon "the folk" there. Niles, who had collected ballads of mountaineers in the eastern parts of Kentucky and Tennessee, accompanied Ulmann on several Appalachian trips. Julia Peterkin invited Ulmann to her family's own Lang Syne Plantation for extended periods, guiding her through the African American Gullah village where workers were only sixty-five years out of slavery. Lyle Saxon hosted her at a northern Louisiana plantation named Melrose and also in New Orleans, where Ulmann took her cameras into the religious communities, the cemeteries, and among vendors in the lively Vieux Carre. Olive Dame Campbell, in western North Carolina, acquainted Ulmann with an educational method directed toward building "an enlivened, enlightened rural population."

    Using these contacts, Ulmann pushed her work in new directions. Had she never created more than her architectural studies, pictorial landscapes, and portraits of famous people, she still would have secured a place for herself in the annals of fine photography. But she developed her photographic eye further, carving a unique niche that bridged pictorialism and documentary. She combined what was considered an old-fashioned tonalistic photographic style in the late 1920s with a documentarian's sense of reform. She arranged scenes and people and objects in rural America in order to show them to audiences with urban sensibilities, not just people who lived in cities but transplanted reformers who wished to celebrate and manipulate agrarian traditions and symbols. Her photographs took their place on the walls of rural schools and country hotels in equal measure to the space and influence they wielded in New York City galleries and at the White House. And as the objects of her camera eye slowly changed, Ulmann ultimately came to realize what photography could achieve. In 1930 she told Allen Eaton, with whom she later collaborated on a book, "I am of course glad to have people interested in my pictures as examples of the art of photography, but my great wish is that these human records shall serve some social purpose." Ulmann's articulation of this desire places her alongside other "documentary" photographers who used their pictures in the 1930s to evoke social change.

(Continues...)

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	ix
	Introduction	1
1	Documentarian with Props Doris Ulmann's Vision of an Ideal America	9
2	Portraitist as Documentarian Dorothea Lange's Depiction of American Individualism	75
3	A Radical Vision on Film Marion Post's Portrayal of Collective Strength	125
4	Of Machines and People Margaret Bourke-White's Isolation of Primary Components	197
5	Modernism Ascendant Berenice Abbott's Perception of the Evolving Cityscape	251
	Conclusion	291
	Notes	299
	Bibliography	331
	Index	349

Editorial Reviews

Profiles five female photographers, their work, their motivations and their reflection of America.

Lexington Herald-Leader

Succeeds in conveying to the reader the remarkable intellectual curiosity and wherewithal of these women, as evidenced by the vibrancy and variety of the their work.

Magill Book Reviews

Gives credit to the women who had the unique ability to capture the unfailing human spirit in their images.

Kentucky Monthly

McEuen looks beyond the image, in this case photographs, to understand who fashioned the image and why.

Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

McEuen has contributed an impressively-researched, well-written, and engaging volume, rich in contextual details and appealing to specialists and general readers alike.

NWSA Journal

Each short biographical study of these artists and their professional habits charts the evolution of socially conscious photography.

Arkansas Review

Winner of the 1999 Emily Toth Award for the best feminist study of popular culture given by the Women's Caucus of the Popular Culture Association.

From the Publisher

A valiant, well-researched effort to bridge the history of visual culture with American social and political history.

Journal of American History

The quality in this study rests in McEuen's ability to synthesize individual creativity with a description of the period, and how these women's photography played a role in so many aspects of it.

Choice

Illuminates both the work and the personalities of the artists—as well as the difficulties of being a woman photographer at the time.

Ohioana Quarterly

A treasury of information and analysis.... A rich resource for anyone interested in the history of photography, women's history, and American history in general.

Bloomsbury Review

"I'm not a nice girl. I'm a photographer," retorted Berenice Abbott to a New Deal bureaucrat who, upon seeing her Bowery pictures, warned that nice girls avoid certain New York neighborhoods. The five American women photographers profiled in McEuen's biographical-critical sketches brought the independence, brashness, curiosity and feminist spirit exemplified by Abbott's remark to documentary photography, and in doing so, helped transform the genre--and, indirectly, the nation. In this vibrant and penetrating study, McEuen, a history professor at Kentucky's Transylvania University, shows how Doris Ulmann's romanticized composite portrait of a disappearing rural America challenged the pace of change in the rapidly industrializing 1920s. Dorothea Lange's 1930s' portraits of determined strikers and Dust Bowl refugees (made in the employ of New Deal agencies), were aimed toward getting them relief. Marion Post, another New Deal photographer, crisscrossed the country, from Vermont town meetings to Memphis juke joints, idealizing a panorama of Americans at work and play to promote collective action. Flamboyant advertising-photographer-turned-modernist Margaret Bourke-White's famous paeans to the machine age gave way to a sensational, unflattering book whose images of Southern poverty, racism and despair attempted to bolster the veracity of Tobacco Road (by husband Erskine Caldwell). Abbott's wondrous WPA survey of New York (now a touring exhibition) portrays a city in flux as the 19th century's buildings fell to the skyscrapers. Studded with 54 b&w photos, this clear, unstuffy inquiry opens a window on American culture between the world wars. (Dec.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The best books always leave their audiences wanting more. That is certainly true of this gem of a work by assistant history professor McEuen. Using the careers of five preeminent photographers of the 1920s and 1930s, she charts the development of documentary photojournalism in the United States. That the five individuals chosen for analyses are women (Doris Ulmann, Dorothea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott, Margaret Bourke-White, and Berenice Abbott) allows for some commentary on the societal obstacles each had to overcome to have a professional career. The bulk of the narrative, however, deals with the approaches these photographers took in presenting their subjects and the techniques they employed to create a totally new journalistic field. Most worked at some point to record the effects of government projects on those most affected by the Great Depression. In the process the photographs also captured images of human dignity (Lange), collective action (Wolcott), technological power (Bourke-White), and urban transformation (Abbott). Although the book includes many photographs illustrating the author's assertions, others mentioned in the text are sorely missed. Highly recommended for all libraries.--Rose M. Cichy, Osterhout Free Lib., Wilkes-Barre, PA Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

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