Young Wife, Possibly North Carolina

Doris Ulmann, about 1928

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Artist: Doris Ulmann (American, 1882–1934)
Medium: Platinum print
Size: Image: 20.2 × 15 cm (7 15/16 × 5 7/8 in.)
Culture: American
Museum: J. Paul Getty Museum
Rights: CC0 — no rights reserved

In 1928, the year a federally funded American Folklife Center was initiated, the August issue of The Mentor magazine featured numerous articles about the Appalachian Trail and life in the Southern Highlands, including "Old- Time American Stock" (introduced by one of Doris Ulmann's pictures), "Martha Berry and Her Mountain School," and "Elizabethan Settlements in North Carolina." Additionally, Ulmann's "Among the Southern Mountaineers," a portfolio of sixteen portraits, had a prominent place in this edition of the journal.

The captions designate the sitters as an eighty-three-year-old man who "had never been photographed," a "splendid type of young American manhood" displaying the "fearlessness and sturdiness of the mountains," a former miner whose relatives were "among the first settlers," and this young woman, shown in a more sympathetic pose that situates her in a garden setting, described as a "daughter who said that the hardest thing, when married, was to leave her mother." A broad-shouldered, unpampered woman apparently used to farm labor, she is also quoted as saying that she thought "it easier to work in a cornfield than to pose for a picture."

She appears to be of mixed race, like the woman at her laundry in Monday (87.XM.89.73), and is possibly a descendant of what is sometimes referred to as the "lost tribe of Raleigh." Although not representative of the pure Anglo-Saxon strain thought to be isolated in the Southern Highlands, this individual embodies another contemporary fascination of East Coast intellectuals. Such books as Julia Peterkin's Bright Skin (1932, dedicated to Ulmann) had as their subject the paradoxical life of persons of mixed blood.

Text: J. Paul Getty Trust, CC BY 4.0.