Getty Museum

Farm Couple with Picked Cotton, Southeastern U.S.

Date

1929–1931

Medium

Platinum print

Culture

American

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

Object ID

f882ae6d-d286-490e-92c8-3757ed61a1bd

In her nearly twenty years of serious photographic activity, Doris Ulmann portrayed many couples, both famous and obscure. The prominence of these individuals seemed to matter less than their respective talents and the relationship captured by the camera. This anonymous double portrait is found in the midst of images of Native Americans and African Americans in an album at the University of Oregon that also contains two other views of this man and woman with four children, apparently the rest of their family. Ulmann chose to print in platinum this image of the couple alone, thereby simplifying both the composition and the personal dynamics involved. The two are not shown in the process of harvesting the cotton crop, but are displaying it, in a more decorative than documentary manner. The husband, kneeling in shadow, serves only as a complementary prop for his wife, who is presented in a light-colored dress and bonnet, the latter possibly donned just for this photograph. Ulmann's rendering of this rural pair appears at first to be more formally posed than those made a few years later by federally sponsored field photographers like Walker Evans (1903-1975) and Dorothea Lange (1895-1965), but it is, in fact, no more staged than many of their pictures, obtained in the cause of social reform. Judith Keller. *Doris Ulmann*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1996), 68. ©1996, J. Paul Getty Trust.

The authoritative record is held by Getty Museum. LinkedCulture surfaces this object and its connections; it does not alter institutional metadata.