Light and Air The Photography of Bayard Wootten (review)

reviews Our regular review section features some of the best new books and films. From time to time, you'll also find reviews of important new museum exhibitions and public history sites, and retrospectives on classic works that continue to shape our understanding of the South and its people. Our aim is to explore the rich diversity of southern life and the approaches of those who study it. In this issue we experience the light and air of Bayard Wootten's photographs, learn "what shoes have to do with shouting all over God's heaven, " and land in William Faulkner's world. Light and Air The Photography ofBayard Wootten ByJerry W. Cotten University of North Carolina Press, 1998 253 pp. Cloth, $37.50 Reviewed by Jessie Poosch, Professor Emerita at Tulane University's Newcomb Art Department, and coauthor withJohn Cuthbert ofDavidHunterStrother, "One ofthe Best Draughtsmen the Country Possesses" from West Virginia University Press, 1 997. The North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina Library in Chapel Hill owns over 97,000 negatives of photographs taken by the WoottenMoulton Studio, a New Bern-Chapel Hill photographic business in operation from1906 until 1954. It also owns 260 original exhibition prints taken by Bayard Wootten (1875—1959). This is a treasure trove of material. Jerry W Cotten's Light andAir examines the career of Bayard Wootten within the broader history oftwentieth-century photography and reproduces a selection of 1 36 photographs, mosdy from the 1930s. These are images ofthe South: landscapes , wooden cabins, a plantation house, but mosdy "black and white Americans in the lower reaches ofsociety." Have we seen their faces before? Some were published as illustrations for books, notably Muriel Earley Sheppard's Cabins in the Laurel (193 5 ), Charles Morrow Wilson's BackwoodsAmerica (1934), and Olive Tilford Dargan's From My HighestHill· Carolina's Mountain Folks (1941 ). The photos collected by Cotten are both similar to and different from the better-known Depression-era photos: those, for example, ofAfrican Americans in Charleston 74 and Appalachian mountaineers taken by Doris Ulmann, those of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans for the Farm Security Administration, or those ofMargaret Bourke-White in Erskine Caldwell 's YouHaveSeen TheirFaces (1937). Each ofthese photographers is associated with the "straight" or realistic and documentary movement in photography . Wootten, a decade or two older, was a dedicated pictorialist, part of an earlier movement in which photographers aimed to create images that rivaled the form ofpainting, makinguse ofmood, studied compositions (sometimes posed or contrived ), a tendency to favor picturesque or sentimental subjects, and an emphasis on atmospheric effects (hence the Light and Air tide). Cotten makes astute comparisons between the work of the "realists" and Wootten's slighdy softer, gender images. But the distinction between die two approaches is not always as sharp to the reader. The selection of subject matter is crucial, and the choices were often remarkably similar; those ofthe realists sometimes seemed to deliberately convey images of dire poverty. Born in New Bern, the daughter of a photographer (who died when she was five) and a mother with an artistic bent, Wootten became interested in photography around 1904. Driven by financial need, she set up her own business, a bold move for a woman ofher generation. Her half-brother, George C. Moulton, soon joined her and handled much ofthe routine photography that kept them afloat financially . Early on, Wootten established a contact with the military at Fort Bragg, doing portraits and job work, and in 1928 she and Moulton moved to Chapel Hill to do similar work for the University of North Carolina. (Many of those 97,000 negatives at the North Carolina Collection represent the bread-and-butter business that sustained them.) As early as 1910 Wootten exhibited at a meeting ofthe Photographic Association of America. She remained a member of its Women's Federation and kept in touch with the Pictorial Photographers ofAmerica until that organization's demise around 1920. A few years later Wootten visited the Appalachian School (now Penland) in the mountains ofwestern North Carolina, a school run by her cousin Lucy Morgan with the aim of reviving rural handicrafts as a basis for fireside industries. Wootten took pictures for the...