Young Wife, Possibly North Carolina

From the Getty Museum record

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](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/62357/doris-ulmann-laundry-day-north-carolina-american-about-1929/)), 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. Adapted from Judith Keller. *Doris Ulmann*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1996), 46. ©1996, J. Paul Getty Trust.