Getty Museum

[Bill Williams's Boy, Whitesburg, Kentucky]

Date

1928–1934

Medium

Platinum print

Culture

American

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

Object ID

35d863f3-b1ba-4295-b3ce-f1c6b35b7803

This portrait may have been produced on Doris Ulmann's first trip to the South with her assistant, John Jacob (“Jack”) Niles (1892-1980), in 1928. They visited the Hindman Settlement School and met with folk musicians while in Kentucky; this boy might have been the son of one of their hosts in Whitesburg. His pose, like that of the young black girl seen in *Portrait Study* ([87.XM.89.81](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/62365/doris-ulmann-portrait-study-probably-south-carolina-or-louisiana-american-about-1929-1931/)), has clearly been assumed under careful direction from the photographer. The introspection the picture expresses seems quite modern, but the dark tonality and soft-focus rendering cause it to take on the melancholy mood of turn of-the-century Pictorialism. The influence of Clarence White (1871-1925), Ulmann's friend and teacher, is suggested by the subject of the child (White often used his own children as models) and in the atmosphere of reverie similar to White's own vein of Romanticism. The black void at the left, which, along with the window frame, is part of Ulmann's framing device, implies physical as well as spiritual isolation, a condition she may have sensed or projected upon this small-town resident. Judith Keller. *Doris Ulmann*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1996), 44. ©1996, J. Paul Getty Trust.

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