“Folks, we have come to take your picture”

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

Photo above: John Jacob Niles carrying Doris Ulmann across Cut Shin Creek, KY.

“Miss [Doris] Ulmann’s point of view about the people she photographed was quite simple. She concluded that there would always be someone with a snapshot camera to photograph the pretty girls with frills, dresses and curled hair, made-up eyes and lips. She was concerned not with these people, but with genuine, downright individuals. You had to be an individual, a character more or less, before she was interested in you even a little bit. She photographed a great many doctors.

“She photographed a great many scientists. She photographed musicians and actors. She photographed Italian fruit vendors on Bleeker Street; we made a tour over to Boston where we photographed the Harvard dons. But she felt that all of them had some quality that could be called genuine, and she didn’t see them as dressed-up people with pressed pants and well-tied neckties at all.

“She saw beyond that to the person who was doing something. I think she loved most the white mountaineers, the old patriarch types; she loved the old women and the little children, but particularly the old ones. She saw in their faces the care and the trouble of the awful effort they had made to carry on life now that they had reached the afternoon or evening of their days.

“She felt that it was her job to get a good clear impression of it on one of her plates. It was a tremendous opportunity for a city woman, a city-bred woman like Doris, to come into these isolated backwoods places and see the highlanders—see them work and play, see them up close in their houses, sit with them, talk with them, philosophize with them, and finally photograph them. Of course, I took down a good deal of the things that they said, and tried to take down the music they would sing.

“We would pull up in front of someone’s house right beside a very nicely paved road, take out the camera, set it up, and I would say, “Folks, we have come to take your picture,” and they would line up in a row and that was all there was to it. They would bring down spinning wheels and portions of looms and cards and other things, and show us how their ancestors carried on, and we would photograph them in their granny’s old linsey-woolsey dresses.”

—John Jacob Niles
Recounting a 1933-34 photography trip through Tennessee, Kentucky, and North Carolina with photographer Doris Ulmann
[transcribed from a tape recording]
The Call Number, v.19 no.2 Spring 1958. ©University of Oregon

Source: http://boundless.uoregon.edu/cgi-bin/browseresults.exe?CISOROOT=/Ulmann2

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