Gowin Deluxe Crack
Clotilde Wilks
How extraordinary these simple portraits are, these dignified half-lengths, so artfully posed and lit. How deeply they seem to penetrate into the innermost souls of the simple mountain people they depict. And how strange to think that they could have been made by an aging invalid lady from New York, who had jolted about the rural South on the execrable roads of the early 1930s in an oversize Lincoln sedan piled to the roof with food, equipment and clothes.
She was a rich amateur of talent and devotion, one of that rare breed that figures so largely in the history of photography, and of course she did not have to do it. She had a house on Park Avenue, two cooks, a dressmaker, nurses, a chauffeur, and plenty of money to pay for other help. She could easily have taken to her bed or devoted herself to bridge and society as many other women in her circumstances had chosen to do. Instead, she studied photography with Clarence White, and until she died in 1934 at the age of fifty from the stomach disorders that plagued her all her life, she devoted herself to the art of the photographic portrait in a grand and cantankerous way that had something of the dowager duchess in it.
Thus Miss Ulmann's Southern pictures are, in a sense, official portraits too. And thus, there is an element of condescension in them. What they seem to express is not so much the real life of the Southern poor as the vain desire of the well-bred Northern rich to find, or if need be to found, somewhere far away from home, a contented, industrious peas antry to whom they can play Lord and Lady Bountiful.
And thus it was, I believe, that this rich and talented New York amateur found herself with two ambiguous masterpieces. One of them, Roll, Jordan, Roll, with a text by Julia Peterkin, has long been out of print, though interested parties can find a well-preserved copy of the deluxe edition in the Rare Book room of the New York Public Library. Her other masterpiece is The Appalachian Photographs of Doris Ulmann, a beautiful and moving document reflecting an unsettling paradox.