The Minister's Wife, Ephrata, Pennsylvania

From the Getty Museum record

Doris Ulmann recorded this woman and her husband ([87.XM.89.140](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/62490/doris-ulmann-the-minister-at-ephrata-pennsylvania-american-1927/)) individually and together in a series of fifteen poses. These austere pictures are reminiscent of pendant portraits by fifteenth-century Netherlandish artists like Jan van Eyck or Rogier van der Weyden. The sitter’s husband, probably the head of a Dunkard congregation, was featured in "Character Portraits by Doris Ulmann," a 1927 article published in *The Mentor* and authored by Hamlin Garland, a pioneer of the new naturalism in American literature. Garland offered more detail about the photographer’s interactions with the minister than his wife. The stern woman is presented here in a print that sets off her face and delicate, customary white cap against a broad swath of blackness. (For another portrait of a woman from the Dunkard community, see [87.XM.89.61](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/62345/doris-ulmann-old-woman-american-about-1925-1929/)). Adapted from Judith Keller. *Doris Ulmann*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1996), 34. ©1996, J. Paul Getty Trust.