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Abstract
In 1933 and 1934, Doris Ulmann traveled to Brasstown, North Carolina, at the invitation of Olive Dame Campbell, founder of the John C. Campbell Folk School. Drawing on her interest in marginalized and rural populations, Ulmann photographed students at the Folk School and others in the Brasstown area with the intention of using her photographs to illustrate Allen Eaton’s Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands (1937). Ulmann’s process and aesthetics, which used outdated glass plate negatives and the Pictorialist style, produced an anachronistic view of her Appalachian subjects. Ulmann printed her work as platinum prints, which further connected her with earlier “fine art” photography, while at the same time suggesting a disjuncture between her working-class subjects and the use of the platinum print for high-end portraiture. While undergoing her research on Ulmann, however, the author unearthed a previously unknown personal connection to Doris Ulmann’s work from Brasstown. This article posits that through an engagement with the materiality of photography — and especially, through the enduring beauty of the platinum print — we might reconsider the way photography acts on us: that Barthes’ punctum is not only a specter that haunts us, but a physical, corporeal tie to our past.
Acknowledgements
I thank David Brose, Mary and Tom Doornbos, Keather Gougler, Beatrice Robinson Hogan, Jerry Jackson, Katie Pressley, and Kelley Totten for their invaluable assistance with this project.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man.
2. Ulmann, The Appalachian Photographs of Doris Ulmann; Ulmann and Coles, The Darkness and the Light; Menze, Doris Ulmann; Featherstone, Doris Ulmann; McEuen, Seeing America; Jacobs, The Life and Photography of Doris Ulmann; Fariello, Movers & Makers; Houk, “Doris Ulmann: A Portrait in Dignity.”
3. Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography.
4. Eaton, Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands.
5. This is not to say that Curtis’ images are not unruly objects into themselves, with complex social lives. See, for example, James Clifford’s discussion of Curtis in the essay “Museums as Contact Zones,” from Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. See also Glass, “A Cannibal in the Archive.”
6. Waldroup, “Indigenous Modernities.”
7. Stewart, A Space on the Side of the Road, 3–4.
8. Ibid., 32, 34.
9. Ibid., 34.
10. See note 1 above.
11. Totten, “Making Craft”; Special to The Christian Science Monitor, “In a Danish Folk-School”; Special to The Christian Science Monitor, “Mountain Folk Life Changing”; “Medford Woman’s ‘Folk School’ In North Carolina Mountains”; “A Folk School Close to the Community”; Rakoff, “A Basket Case in North Carolina”; Needleman, “Lessons in the Humble Art of Broom-Making”; Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine. See also https://www.wcu.edu/library/DigitalCollections/CraftRevival/story/campbell.html, accessed 8 July 2019.
12. Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine, xx.
13. Ibid., 13.
14. Ibid., 109.
15. Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine, 110. See also Becker, Selling Tradition.
16. McEuen, Seeing America, 51.
17. Ulmann, The Appalachian Photographs of Doris Ulmann, n.p.
18. Ulmann, n.p. McEuan and other scholars also have noted that Ulmann’s subjects wore older clothing; see McEuan, Seeing America, 58-60; Becker, Selling Tradition, 80; Totten, “Making Craft, Performing an Idea of Craft at U.S. Folk Schools,” 22.
19. See note 16 above, 30.
20. Gillespie, Vernacular Modernism, 139.
21. Fabian, Time and the Other. Gillespie also makes the comparison with Curtis, but notes that Ulmann’s work is more modernist in both outlook and aesthetics (Gillespie, Vernacular Modernism, 145).
22. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy.
23. Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine, 110.
24. https://brasstownbeef.com/, accessed 8 July 2019.
25. Totten, “Making Craft,” 16.
26. See https://www.folkschool.org/2019_Catalog/2019_Catalog.html, accessed 8 July 2019.
27. Totten, “Making Craft.”
28. https://www.wcu.edu/library/DigitalCollections/CraftRevival/story/campbell.html, accessed 8 July 2019.
29. Personal communication with Jerry Jackson, Executive Director, July 2018.
30. See https://library.uoregon.edu/speccoll/photo/ulmann, accessed 8 July 2019.
31. Croft, “Laying Ghosts to Rest,” 9.
32. Stewart, A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an “Other” America, 17, italics and boldface in original.
33. Stewart, A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an “Other” America, 5.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Heather Waldroup
Heather Waldroup is Associate Director of the Honors College and Professor of Art History at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. Her research focuses on the history of photography, particularly colonial photography in the Pacific and early women photographers. Her essays have been published in journals including History of Photography, Visual Resources, Photography and Culture, Journal of Pacific History, Modernism/Modernity, and Studies in American Naturalism, as well as various anthologies and exhibition catalogs.