Photographing People of Color

Through her travels in the Appalachian region, Doris Ulmann saw the wide range of people that lived there. Many of those she photographed were white English, Scottish, and Irish descendants; however, she also photographed a significant number of non-white sitters.

While visually there is not a significant difference in the ways that Ulmann portrayed people of color in her work, there is a notable pattern of disregard for these sitters' identities. Many of the photographs taken of Native Americans, African Americans, and Melungeon people have been relegated to ethnic identifiers.

Except for a few people, for example, Ella Webster, a singer who in Niles words " knew the black man's music and the white man's ballads", many people instead of being represented along with their name, location, and profession, many of Ulmann's non-white sitters were only recorded by their ethnicity. This indicates that, even though Doris Ulmann was truly a progressive photographer for her time, she still possessed a bias for the white "American type", as well as a clear indifference towards the identities of other racial groups.

Even though art historians are now attempting to retrieve this lost information through extensive research, there is no guarantee that all, if any, of it can be found.

Here is a selection of additional Ulmann photographs that also exemplify Ulmann's interest in photographing minority ethnic groups, without recording their identities.