
A small and rather frail woman, Doris Ulmann must have cut a strange
figure as she trudged across remote mountains like a waif in the shadow
of her huge camera and tripod. One of America's pioneer female
photographers, she was born into New York's latter 19th century cultural
elite where she gained early fame for her portraits of luminaries like
Albert Einstein and William Butler Yeats. Over time, she became almost
obsessively focused on the reclusive inhabitants of America's
hinterlands, and most of the works in this Ogden expo are views of the
lifestyles she encountered in rural Appalachian enclaves, and among the
Gullah community of South Carolina's Sea Islands, places where many of
the people she met in the 1930s appeared amazingly unchanged from their
forebears in previous centuries.
Although the Gullah people, descendants of slaves who kept their own language, share similarities with other rural black communities, the lack of any hint of modern life gives her
Roll Jordan Roll series a mysterious, archaic quality. Her
Baptism – Group of Four view of a preacher and his congregants all draped in white, above, is an ebony and ivory evocation of a life changing religious ritual met with the same dignified resolve that characterizes Ulmann's best portraits – a quality seen even in
Chaingang, right, a group of convicts in stripes digging ditches, or in a fisherman in overalls holding his net. Although African ethnicity predominates, there is something as deeply American about these images as old Stephen Foster songs.

Americana is also pervasive in many of Ulmann's photographs of
Appalachian lifestyles, especially in her views of rural craftspersons
posing with their tools. Even so, anyone who grew up associating Appalachia with popular 20th century “hillbilly" stereotypes might be shocked by Ulmann's otherworldly
Woman With Peaked Hat, or by
Child with Parents Dancing, right. Here the rakish father, and the mother covered in concealing fabrics, might pass for “Romanian gypsies” or “Albanian Muslims.” Such images convey the inescapable otherness that lies at the core of American identity, even among people who now sometimes claim to be the only “real Americans.” ~Bookhardt / From the Highlands to the Lowlands: Photographs by Doris Ulmann, Through Sept. 16,
Ogden Museum of Southern Art, 925 Camp St., 539-9600.