Doris Ulmann Papers

Doris Ulmann was born in New York City in 1884.  She attended the School of Ethical Culture at Columbia University and later studied photography at the Clarence H. White School of Photography.  She married and divorced Charles H. Jaeger, a prominent orthopedic surgeon. Ulmann’s published works include Portraits of the Medical Faculty of the John Hopkins University (1922), A Portrait of American Editors (1925), Roll, Jordan, Roll (1933) text by Julia Peterkin, and Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands (1937), text by Allen Eaton).  In 1971 the Jargon Society published The Appalachian Photographs of Doris Ulmann, with a remembrance by John Jacob Niles, a folklorist and ballad collector who accompanied Ulmann on her trips through the Southern Appalachians. Ulmann’s photographic portraits of southern Appalachian people, taken in the late 1920s and early 1930s, are classics.  During her time in the mountains, Ulmann showed a special fondness for the John C. Campbell Folk School and Berea College, and portraits of students and people from these two areas are found in her collection. Ulmann died in New York City on August 28, 1934.   Her will and bequest established the Doris Ulmann Foundation.