The Life and Photography of Doris Ulmann by Philip Walker Jacobs (review)

folk idioms, when divisions spawned by the issue of the Viet Nam conflict shattered the cohesiveness of bands, tested the bonds of friendship, a time when the advent of multitracking and multimiking began to affect a form that was initially developed to deal with the constraints of the one-microphone radio show. Yet the authors, academics drawn into the flow of the music, are objective, not didactic, letting the pictures speak for themselves as the waves of systems intertwine like the bramble and the rose. The pleasure of random discovery within Bluegrass Odyssey makes a strong argument for books as physical objects — to be picked up, thumbed through, read, viewed, and read again. One need not be knowledgeable about the genre to be rewarded by a perusal of this book — the text speaks for itself, the photographs speak for the subjects. Carl Fleischhauer oversaw the production of the magnificent Library of Congress American Memory website. Neil G. Rosenberg, a professor of folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland, won a Grammy award for his liner notes to the Anthology of American Folk Music. —Clark Dimond Philip WalkerJacobs. The Life and Photography ofDoris Ulmann. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2001. 352 pages, $40.00, cloth. (The Little Spy ofBeauty Who Shot Softly and Carried a Big Box) Picture this. Two women roll-starting a Model A Ford down a hill somewhere in the deep South in the middle of the Great Depression. One is a head taller than the other. Both are smoking cigarettes and picking little bits of tobacco from their blood-red lips (the cigarette filter had not been perfected). Theyhave been together a great deal and are beginning to insult each other in little ways. They are quarreling over, of all things, boyfriends. They leave their chauffeur and their great, spacious car under a shade tree, because the car was too large for the narrow, lonely roads. In the backseat of the little Ford is a camera as big as a farmer's mailbox. The women are long past forty years old, and they are looking for something to photograph. Or picture this. The unemployed and the malcontent mill about the streets of New York, and kick the air with their worn-out shoes. Doris Ulmann is planning a portrait session at her home on ParkAvenue, when someone knocks at the door. There is a message .. . her dear Uncle Carl, 71 a serious amateur pictorial photographer in his own right, who studied with Clarence White at Columbia, has died. There is a substantial inheritance. His niece is now, in other words, very, very rich. The stock market is falling to pieces, but Uncle Carl was too smart for that. Now picture this. A studio gallery in New York City, a hundred and fifty blocks north of Wall Street. A group of photographers and their fellow travelers are having the most inane and impossible debate—for the seventy-seventh time. Lately it seems as if all words and thoughts stumble into sinkholes. The same questions arise, questions without answers—Is photography art? Or is it something else? And isfuzzy good? Or isfuzzybad? One group ofphotographers argued that itwas stupid to take fuzzy pictures when you could just as easily take them sharp. But others thought that photographs should be deliberately fuzzy, that pictures take on a special beauty and meaning when hard-edged, sharp focus is deliberately abandoned. Soft focus lenses were preferred, or even no lenses at all. In this kind of photography, slight movements by the subject or subjects in a picture should not be discouraged, but should be accepted as reminders that things exist in a state of change. Movement was implied in the photographic blur. Clarence White, a kind, much-loved photography teacher, was known for building confidence and turning young people, especially young women, into powerful artists. He taught the pictorial techniques to Doris Ulmann, a way of seeing and a way of taking pictures, a way of emphasizing light while sacrificing detail, that produced art-like images resembling the paintings of Millet or Corot— perhaps even Monet and the early impressionists. Ulmann was devoted to this way of working, adding the velvet finger...