PART 1 - PROJECT 1 - COURSEWORK

Study on Doris Ulmann's portrait and research

I searched at UCA online library

https://ucreative.summon.serialssolutions.com/#!/search?ho=t&fvf=ContentType,Book%20%2F%20eBook,f&l=en&q=historic%20photographic%20portraiture (research online on 04/11/2018)

and found the book:

Doris May Ulmann (1882-) was born in New York City from a immigrated family of German Jews.

Fig. 10. Doris Ulmann Taking Photograph with View Format Camera, ca. 1933-1934. Gelatinsilver print. John Jacob Niles. John Jacob Niles Collection, Special Collections and Archives, University of Kentucky Libraries. (Jacobs, PW 2001, Life and Photography of Doris Ulmann, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. [4 November 2018]. Created from ucreative-ebooks on 2018-11-04 07:32:49. Beginnings page 24).

Because of their origins, Doris and her family were exposed to the consequences of the so-called "Jeudeophobia", so popular at that time.

Nevertheless, Bernhard Ulmann (Doris' father) had the opportunity to form his own import-export company, marry Gertrude Maas and rise two daughters, Edna and Doris, and grow prosperous business and family.

Doris was "....raised in a highly affluent and sophisticated home. In this environment, she was waited on by servants and instructed in the proper manners etiquette, and dress expected of a young woman in her position. She also was taught respect for her family (including an extended family of uncles, aunts, cousins, and other relatives with whom she always lived in close proximity in Manhattan), as well as respect for the elderly......"
"....Under the influence of her parents and her uncle Carl Ulmann, she was schooled in the value of education, literature, the arts, and fine books and handicrafts.."
(Jacobs, PW 2001, Life and Photography of Doris Ulmann, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. [4 November 2018]. Created from ucreative-ebooks on 2018-11-04 07:32:49. Beginnings pages 2 & 3).

Logically, Doris Ulmann attended Jewish schools (i.e the Etical Culture School) and was influenced by Dr. Felix Adler (school's founder), which promoted a philosophy of good works and "benevolent action". Adler believed that education and not religion were "means of salvation".

All this was the source of Doris Ulmann's love for children and unfortunate innocents, disregarded and mistreated by American society. This influence lasted for all her life and her photography.

"....In her later photographic work with Appalachian, African, and Native Americans, and in her later bequests to two Appalachian schools, Ulmann would affirm Felix Adler's "faith in the worth of every human being" as well as "his belief that differences in type contribute importantly to a democratic society." In both her art and her life, she would seek, as Adler had suggested, to change American society "by active intervention" and thus to "reconstruct" it....."

Doris Ullman had a family situation that permitted her to live without the pressure of a career, sustain herself financially or even leave parents house. It is demonstrated that in 1910 (at age 27) she still resided with her parents.

After her mother's death (1913) she married, in 1914. She continued to reside in the Ulmann family residence and began to periodically travel around United States and Europe, sharing her interest for arts and photography with her husband.

Doris Ullmann' Photography and Influences

Doris Ullmann was born in 1882, when photography had been recognized as an art form. The more, they believed that photography was particularly suited to the female spirit and could be a profession in which woman could excel. Maybe this is the reason why, in that period, there were several popular female practitioners like Rose Clark, Frances Benjamin Johnston, Gertrude Kasebier, Adelaide Skeel, Octave Thanet (Alice French), Elizabeth Flint Wade, and Catherine Weed Barnes.

Jacobs states that Doris Ullman was mainly influenced by Frances Benjamin Johnston and Gertrude Kasebier. "..Johnston encouraged women to pursue the profession, noting it "should appeal particularly to women, and in it there are great opportunities for a good-paying business. . . .".

"Kasebier, in turn, inspired women by inviting them to join with her in an artistic journey to "make likenesses that are biographies" and "to put into each photograph . . . temperament, soul, humanity......"

Doris Ulmann was inspired by these statements and first started her photographic journey as a hobby, then began to study seriously photography in 1914, when she was married at age 31.

She then studied photography under Clarence White. According to Jacobs, White was the first lecturer in photography in United States, in the art department at Teacher's College at Columbia and opened the White School of Photograpy in 1914, together with Max Weber. In this school were graduated famous photographers and filmmakers, like Margaret Bourke-White, Anton and Martin Bruehl, Laura Gilpin, Dorothea Lange, Paul Outerbridge, Ralph Steiner, Karl Struss.

Jacobs states that "It is not difficult to understand what led Ulmann to become a pupil of Clarence White. Certainly the beauty of his work, his majestic and yet subtleand lyrical compositions of women, as well as his capacity to make the ordinary appear extraordinary, enthralled and inspired Ulmann and left her with the desire to learn how to do what White did...".

She used a large format tripod-mounted folding camera, that was awkward to carry (since she was using it both for studio and field shooting). She used a soft-focus lens: she is well known because she gave an impressionistic mood to portraits and because her gentle approach to her sitters.

"White's influence upon Ulmann is most evident in her compositional and aesthetic design, in the different ways in which she positioned her sitters' faces, hands, upper torso, or whole body in natural light, against a background of the darkness of a room or window or door so that their personality and character might become the primary concern of the viewer."

Other influences to Ulmann's photography come from the nineteenth-century Scottish portrait team of David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson. Between the typical characteristics of these practitioner's portraits, there were many images with contemplative-looking men and women, away from the photographer, with props, in order to reflect interests and vocations.

As a lot of other photographers, she was also influenced by Dutch and Flemish painters, like Rembrandt and Rubens.

Portrait Selection

I selected a portrait by Doris Ulmann. The "Young African American Dock Worker" was taken between 1918 and 1920, when Doris Ulmann was 38, and just before she got seriously hill.

(Jacobs, PW 2001, Life and Photography of Doris Ulmann, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. [4 November 2018]. Created from ucreative-ebooks on 2018-11-04 07:32:49. Beginnings, page 53).

In this period Doris Ulmann shifted her opera focus from photographing "beautiful people", often of high society, to different types of people, races, culture, social level. Maybe it was because of her mentor's death (Clarence White), maybe because, a I wrote before, her first education imprinted her with the need to focus on and protect the unfortunate people she had been always interested to.

The portrait is about somebody who is young, AfroAmerican, worker, in a not-classy working-place like docks. A "different type" of a different, low social level.

Referring to composition, I find a relation, as I read in Jacobs' book, between this portrait and the nineteenth-century Scottish portrait team of David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson: the subject is away from the photographer, and the background is carefully selected in order to connotate the place.

However, Adamson and Hill focussed on usual subjects, the so called "beautiful people", and inserted backgrounds and props in order to point attention on subject's interests and vocations (in the previous portrait, painting and reading).

In Ulmann's portrait props (the cigarette, the stump), dress and background suggest a hard work scenario and help to give to the portrait a meaning of time off and rest.

This portrait is the sign that Doris Ulmann switched from studio portraiture, commissioned by well-paying, well-off-persons, to street portraiture of ordinary people.

The subject smiles and looks toward the camera, that this more typical of a casual shot than a well planned, well prepared and paid studio portrait, where the subject is often contemplative.

Could it be the starting point of street portraiture, at least of female street portraiture? I googled some of these keywords and found out female practitioners like Berenice Abbott, Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, Marion Post, Doris Ulmann herself. Then, in a later period, Diane Arbus, Imogen Cunningham, Sheila Metzner, Judy Dater, Lisette Model, Eve Arnold, Mona Kuhn, Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, Lee Mille, Vivian Maier, Florence Henry.

As stated by McEuen , Doris Ullmann ".....even engaged her sitters in conversations that required them to articulate and defend their opinions. Brief responses were unacceptable to her,.... After isolating certain peculiarities in each individual, Ulmann built on these in her portraits. .....". (McEuen,MA 1999, Seeing America : Women Photographers Between the Wars, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington. Accessed from: ProQuest Ebook Central. Page 21 [4 November 2018]. Created from ucreative-ebooks on 2018-11-04 07:12:30.).

Referring to this portrait, did she engage in a conversation with the dock worker, or did she just ask to take a picture of him? Did she pay something to the sitter?

However, according to Graham Clarke, Doris Ullmann was a "......New York aristocrat taking sympathetic interest in some of the poorest of the rural poor. She made no payment to her subjects but tried - without always succeeding - to give each of her sitters a print...") (The portrait in photography. I. Clarke, Graham,P ublished by Reaktion Books Ltd1-5 Midford Place, Tottenham Court RoadLondon W1P 9HH, UKFirst Published 1992, page 121).