Getty Museum

[Portrait Study, Probably South Carolina or Louisiana]

Creator

American Photographer · 1882–1934

Artist

A New Yorker by birth, Doris Ulmann preserved the rural cultures of the southeastern United States through her photographs. She worked particularly in the "Southern Highlands" of the Appalachian Mountains, creating portraits of the residents. In 1933, she contributed photographs to *Roll, Jordan, Roll*, a book by novelist Julia Peterkin about the vanishing black culture, known as Gullah, of the So

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Date: about 1929–1931
Medium: Platinum print
Culture: American
Department: Photographs
Institution: Getty Museum

In 1929 Julia Peterkin's novel *Scarlet Sister Mary* (1928), a depiction of twentieth-century plantation life, won the Pulitzer Prize. About the same time, she began collaborating with Doris Ulmann on a book that was initially to be built around photographs of African American life and customs in areas of the South designated by Peterkin (1880-1961), such as New Orleans, Mobile, and South Carolina. It appears that changes in their relationship caused this work, entitled *Roll, Jordan, Roll* (1933) ([https://primo.getty.edu](https://primo.getty.edu/primo-explore/fulldisplay?docid=GETTY_ALMA21132793620001551&context=L&vid=GRI&lang=en_US&search_scope=COMBINED&adaptor=Local%20Search%20Engine&tab=all_gri&query=any,contains,julia%20peterkin&mode=basic)), to evolve into a collection of Peterkin's writings with scattered illustrations by Ulmann. It is still unclear who selected and sequenced the pictures. Although this study of an adolescent girl was not used in the volume, it seems to represent much of what is said in Peterkin's chapter on the subject of children. She describes this critical time in a child's life: "Twelve is the age of responsibility, when the recording angel in heaven writes a child's name in a book and marks down every sin against it. . . . Under twelve a child is a 'young child,' and if he dies his soul will not fail to reach heaven, but twelve is the deadline age that changes a 'young child' to an 'old child."' Judith Keller. *Doris Ulmann*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1996), 52. ©1996, J. Paul Getty Trust.

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