Spotlight Exhibit for the UO’s Doris Ulmann photographs collection goes live!

I am excited to announce the publication of the Spotlight exhibit for the University of Oregon’s Doris Ulmann photographs collection (1914-1934). It is now available on the University of Oregon (UO) Libraries digital exhibits page at https://expo.uoregon.edu/spotlight/doris-ulmann. In this exhibit, viewers can access over 2,000 digital images featuring Ulmann’s work sorted by topic and region. 

The exhibit features rarely seen photographs documenting social and cultural history in the American South during the Great Depression in the early 1930s. Subjects include portraits of Appalachians, rural women, literary faces, African Americans, Gullah peoples, school photography (featuring the Hindman Settlement School and Berea College), and candid depictions of American life. Ulmann’s photographs also show detailed images of Appalachian craftspeople quilting, whittling, hooking rugs, spinning, and making baskets, among other activities. 

Exhibit image examples:

Who was Doris Ulmann?

Doris Ulmann (1882-1934) was a photographer from New York City whose early work featured celebrity portraits of prominent intellectuals, artists, and writers. By 1925, her primary aim was to preserve rural traditions in the American South through documenting Appalachian and Gullah community members. Her later materials include the original photographs featured in Julia Peterkin’s Roll, Jordan, Roll (1933) of the African American Gullah community in South Carolina. From 1927, Ulmann was assisted on her rural travels by John Jacob Niles, a musician and folklorist who collected ballads while Ulmann photographed. Her work is most notable for her profound respect for her sitters and ethnographic eye for culture. 

Unfortunately, our understanding of Ulmann is hindered by the fact that very little of her own words and writings remain. An early pictorialist photographer, Ulmann adopted more modernist practices as her work evolved, generating important documentary work focused on the Appalachian and Gullah communities.  Even a cursory review of her work reveals a talented, yet woefully under-recognized photographer. In seeking to understand Ulmann’s significance, it is necessary to understand the role of women in the photographic world during that time frame in addition to surrounding sociological factors. In this light, Ulmann’s work offers a rich opportunity for researchers to investigate the social factors that generate an artistic audience, how particular images gain validity, and which photographers receive renown in the public consciousness (Kowalski, 2000).

How did this project come to be?

This project began in June 2020 as part of a student internship opportunity involving a cross-section of University of Oregon Library departments, including staff from Digital Collections, Digital Scholarship Services, and Special Collections and University Archives. The Doris Ulmann photographs collection was acquired by the University of Oregon in 1954, and has since gone through several iterations of reorganization and digitization. This has resulted in a number of remediation issues for the collection, and it was therefore selected as a focus project for my student internship. 

The main goals for this project were to both address the collection’s remediation needs, and also provide me, as the student intern, with a professional development opportunity to learn more about the management, description, preservation, and access of digital library collections overall. Tasks included working with a team of librarians and archivists to identify remediation goals to fix the description and subject headings for over 1,800 items stored on Oregon Digital in addition to learning about Spotlight exhibit creation for the collection. Through this project, I was able to improve my skills in metadata application, data modeling standards for digital collections, and written protocols outlining workflows and documentation for metadata remediation.

The end result led to the successful metadata remediation of 1,800 photographs as well as the application of metadata description for over 300 newly-digitized prints. This translates into increased discoverability of the collection within the UO’s digital repository (Oregon Digital, viewable at https://oregondigital.org/sets/doris-ulmann), as well as across internet search engines. This effort has directly impacted the online presence of an underappreciated and lesser known female photographer from the early 20th century and features the role of the University of Oregon in preserving her work. On a professional level, the remediation I completed for the Ulmann collection and the current Spotlight exhibit represents not only my goals of gaining insight in collections processing and digitization strategies but also the Digital Collections departmental goals of enhancing collections through improved metadata application and promotion of culturally significant collections.

Future Work and Limitations

Digitization of the UO’s Ulmann collection is ongoing. In its entirety, the collection includes over 10,000 archival images featuring vintage prints, proof prints, and glass-plate negatives. Staff are currently processing an additional upload of six newly-digitized albums to the exhibit within the next couple of months. 

Example of forthcoming album images (pending digitization):

Previous digitization was completed with low-resolution quality images. Future work may entail the digitization of the entire collection as well as re-digitization of previously uploaded images. This work would ensure that each photo is made available at the highest possible quality.

Previous low-resolution digitization:	New high-resolution digitization:

Additionally, metadata remediation and other descriptive work for this collection is inherently limited by the knowledge and experience of current staff involved in the project. Future work would benefit from community engagement efforts to connect with the communities represented in Ulmann’s work and seek input regarding how the collection is described and represented. Additional promotional outreach would also serve to enhance awareness and access for potential use of these materials and avail the UO’s archival resources to a broader effort. Outreach could include contacting historical and cultural institutions focused on preserving the history of the American South, including African American, Gullah peoples, and Appalachian cultural heritage institutions. Such efforts would increase awareness regarding newly available cultural resource materials that are freely accessible and unrestricted by copyright. 

To view the exhibit, please visit https://expo.uoregon.edu/spotlight/doris-ulmann. Alternatively, this photographic collection can also be accessed on Oregon Digital at https://oregondigital.org/sets/doris-ulmann.

Acknowledgements

This project was generously funded by the University of Oregon Libraries Strategic Student Employment Fund of 2020/2021.  Importantly, this project would not have been possible without the support, expertise, and mentorship of the following people:

• Sarah Seymore, Digital Collections Metadata Librarian, Collection Services
• Danielle Mericle, Curator of Visual Resources, Special Collections and University Archives
• Alex Bisio, Lead Processing Archivist, Special Collections and University Archives
• Julia Simic, Assistant Director of Digital Scholarship Services, Digital Production and Preservation
• Randy Sullivan, Digital Production Manager, Digital Scholarship Services
• Alexa Goff, Special Projects Processing Archivist, Special Collections and University Archives

Citations

Kowalski, S. (2000). Fading light: the case of Doris Ulmann. University of Oregon.

Roll, Jordan, roll. Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill. unattributed. “The stuff of American drama in photographs by Doris Ulmann,” Theatre Arts Monthly, v. 14 pp. 132-146. New York, NY: Theatre Arts, Inc.