Doris Ulmann American, 1882-1934 Doris Ulmann, born into a wealthy family in New York City, is known primarily for her sensitive photographs documenting the rural people of Appalachia and the South in the 1920s-30s. She attended the Ethical Culture School and Columbia University Teacher's College (1907), where she studied psychology, law, and photography and was a student of Clarence H. White. A great admirer of White, she later studied at his School of Photography (1914) and joined his organization, the Pictorial Photographers of America (1918). Interested in portraiture, Ulmann began to photograph members of the medical and arts communities in New York in 1918. For these and later portraits, she used a large-format view camera (6 1/2 x 8 1/2 inches) with a soft-focus lens. In the mid-1920s Ulmann began traveling to rural areas to photograph American types and traditional ways of life she believed would soon disappear. She photographed the Dunkard, Mennonite, and Shaker settlements in Virginia, New York, Pennsylvania, and New England, and in 1927, accompanied by Kentucky-born folk singer John Jacob Niles, undertook her well-known series of portraits of the rural people of Appalachia, a project she continued until her death. From 1929-30 Ulmann worked with writer Julia Peterkin on a study of the Gullah people of South Carolina, which resulted in the book Roll, Jordan, Roll (1933). At the time of her death, Ulmann was involved in a collaborative project with Allen Henderson Eaton, taking photographs in Appalachia for his book Handicrafts of the Highlands (1937). M.M.