Still Life with Vines and Shadows, Possibly Georgetown Island, Maine

From the Getty Museum record

Doris Ulmann attended the Ethical Culture School in New York before beginning the study of psychology at Columbia University in 1907. She also took classes in photography with Clarence H. White (1871-1925) in the art department at Columbia Teachers College (see [87.XM.89.156](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/62506/doris-ulmann-clarence-h-white-and-two-students-american-1915/)). White, a one-time colleague of Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) and a founding member of the Photo-Secession, taught photography in the company of the artists Arthur Wesley Dow and Max Weber. Dow, a printmaker who had earlier been an assistant curator of Japanese prints at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, promoted the Eastern principles of creating in two dimensions, accenting the abstract, graphic qualities of any composition. That sensibility is evident in *Still Life with Vines and Shadows*. White founded two schools of his own: one at a summer home on Georgetown Island, Maine, the other in New York. It is believed that Ulmann participated in both. She probably met Dr. Charles Jaeger (1875-1942), an amateur photographer who later became her husband, through White's classes; the two of them were active members of White's Pictorial Photographers of America. This view, and others in the Getty collection (see [87.XM.89.38](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/62322/doris-ulmann-harbor-scene-probably-gloucester-massachusetts-american-1916-1925/) and [84.XP.704.2](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/62279/doris-ulmann-barn-interior-probably-new-england-american-1920/)) may have been obtained during that group's outings from New York or near White's Maine school. Judith Keller. *Doris Ulmann*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1996), 12. ©1996, J. Paul Getty Trust.