Photographic Staging

When Talking about Ulmann's Mountaineers one of Ulmann's biggest criticism was that she was trying to record a culture that was no longer there. As stated by John Jacob Niles, "It was quite easy to get the women to put on their grannies' linsey-woolsey dresses, and they would go into the attics or lean-to-sheds and produce spinning wheels and portions of looms and some wool-crafts. They would gladly show us how their ancestors carried on, and then we would photograph them in these magnificent costumes." One of these women was Wilma Weech who at the time was studying to be a physician. On a normal day, she would not wear a bonnet and a "linsey-woolsey dress" but she was photographed as such for the sake of Ulmann's project.