ART REVIEW : ‘Ulmann’ Explores Two Sides of 1920s, ‘30s

The world tends to a certain symmetry. During the 1920s and ‘30s, artists and intellectuals developed a fascination with American folk cultures as a kind of corrective to a dominant preoccupation with technology. A photographer who played a key role in this revival is the subject of the J. Paul Getty Museum’s gently moving new exhibition, “Doris Ulmann: Photography and Folklore.”

Although Ulmann had numerous exhibitions during her lifetime--she died in 1934 when only 52--she largely slipped from cultural memory until combined recent interest in female artists and photography brought her back to light. It’s particularly apt, therefore, that the Getty has devoted one of its unfailingly illuminating “In Focus” monographs to the artist. Introduced by the show’s curator, Judith Keller, it acts as a mini-biography of an artist who at first seems an unlikely candidate for her calling.

Ulmann was born in New York to a wealthy German Jewish family that afforded her a good education, independent means, a Park Avenue apartment and domestic help. Evidence that she had cultural entree is mirrored in portraits of people as well known as Mexican muralist Jose Clemente Orozco. She once called on the Roosevelts at the White House and was not particularly impressed.

Ulmann was unwell for much of her life. So why would an advantaged urbanite be attracted to the sometimes physically taxing work of photographing the rural poor with the cumbersome equipment required to make platinum prints? The short answer is certainly that her own disabilities, plus a cultural background traditionally humanistic and mindful of the downtrodden, caused her to identify with them.

She attended Columbia, where she studied psychology at the American dawn of Freudianism. Pictorialist Clarence H. White had such an influence on her work that it always remained in the soft-focus mode.

Around 1925, she divorced her surgeon husband and met John Jacob Niles. “Jack,” as he was called, was a somewhat chameleon-like combination of socialite, folklorist, Kentucky balladeer and actor, 10 years her junior. According to the show’s catalog, they are assumed to have been lovers. She hired him as her assistant amid some gossip that Niles was a common gigolo.

The exhibition includes numerous portraits of him. The affection in the pictures is deep and unmistakable. Images of him peeking over the collar of his overcoat, his hands unlocking a door or posing with lovely young flowers of the Kentucky outback are among Ulmann’s best.

In a very real way the exhibition tells two stories. The main text is Ulmann’s sympathetic but never sentimental study of folks she regarded as belonging to an endangered species. The subtext is about a heartfelt relationship between a handsome young man and a plain older woman.

Ulmann wanted her pictures to serve a socially useful purpose but they have none of the reformist edge of, say, Lewis Hine. They are more about people hanging onto both individuality and a sense of community despite soul-crushing circumstances. They’re about overcoming.

“Monday”--probably taken in North Carolina about 1929--pictures a woman doing laundry by hand in a desolate yard. She looks almost angrily at the camera as if to say, “This isn’t demeaning, it’s not even hard. Give me something harder to do.” It’s defiant.

The subject of “The Herbalist” is an androgynous woman looking utterly careless of what the camera thinks of her. She knows how to do things city folk can’t even imagine.

Ulmann photographed a raggedy man with a wooden leg who is fishing and dirt-poor women in Appalachia looking serene on their porch. A pinched young woman shows she can dress up and look pretty as well as people who have it all.

In South Carolina, she saw black Americans, with nothing much more than the clothes on their backs, express amazing faith. In “The Sermon,” upraised arms rejoice at the miracle of life.

In the end, what makes these images so moving is a quality of diffidence Ulmann brought to her work. She was perfectly capable of formally stunning compositions like the mysterious “May Apple.” But when she photographed people, the pictures seem devoid of style or composition, as if they just happened. They deliver the message that it’s not her ego that’s important, it’s these people.

That’s what Ulmann wanted us to remember and we do.

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J. Paul Getty Museum, 17985 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu, through July 7. Closed Mondays. Advanced parking reservations required: (310) 458-2003.