Ellen Handy, The City College of New York
Between Collective Memory and the Usable Past: Doris Ulmann’s Fine Art Ethnography

Doris Ulmann’s work has been semi-excluded from the photographic canon initially developed between the 1940s and 70s, perhaps because it was primarily presented in the discursive spaces of books rather than exhibitions. Her use of the fine art style of Pictorialism (particularly its characteristic soft focus) for documentary work further complicated its reception. The ethnographic emphases of her portraiture and depictions of handicraft objects raises the problem of memory-making versus art in her work; both genres can be classed as aesthetic expression or as factual description.
Ulmann’s book Roll, Jordan, Roll (1933) was a livre d’artiste portraying the labors and religious beliefs of descendants of African American Gullah ex-slaves in South Carolina, in which Ulmann’s portraits accompanied a hybrid fiction/non-fiction text by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Julia Peterkin. By contrast, in Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands (1937), Ulmann’s images played the supporting role of illustrations to Allen H. Eaton’s inventory of the craft traditions of white Appalachia. Race and culture are the subjects of both books, yet are treated very differently and directed to different audiences.
If we accept the idea of a collective memory, photographs are certainly to be found at the heart of its construction during the past two centuries. Yet the sub-conscious, aspects of collective memory are at odds with the deliberation and framing which are hallmarks of the photographic medium. We might also consider the concept coined by critic Van Wyck Brooks in 1915 of a search for a “usable past.” This peculiarly American notion is utilitarian in its presumption that the past’s significance is in its value to the present. Collective and memory and usable past both imply vectors in time, yet while collective memory points from the remembered past to the identity of today, the usable past surveys the present for traces of a past which might be of value in the future. Additionally, the notion of the usable past accords agency to actors of the present as collective memory does not.
Ulmann’s varying approaches to her subject matter in the rural south can be productively explored in relation to both collective memory and the search for a usable past, and in comparison to the better known project of salvage ethnography initiated by Edward S. Curtis (The North American Indian) and the federal government sponsored FSA survey of economic distress.

Olivier Mateo, Université Paris 3 Sorbonne-Nouvelle
Les photographes africains-américains au service de la mémoire. Somebody, Somewhere, Wants Your Photograph![1]

 

Les Africains-américains se sont saisis très précocement de la photographie dans une multiplicité d’usages et de finalités. Entre les années 1940 et les années 1960 la pratique photographique a souvent été mise au service de la construction d’une mémoire du groupe minoritaire. Les finalités peuvent différer, du témoignage militant (dont les exemples sont nombreux de Gordon Parks à Danny Lyon) à la pratique commerciale des studios qui fleurissent dans les ghettos africains-américains avec par exemple E. Allen Cole et James Van Der Zee. Cependant cette production a des traits communs, autour de la promotion de la dignité des Africains-américains.
Nous proposons de tenter de mettre en lumière comment la photographie a, dans ce contexte de ces années, été mise au service d’une « identité collective » ce qui pose la question d’une photographie « noire » par l’auteur ou par le thème. Les artistes photographes ont pu contester l’usage documentaire de leur œuvre, ainsi lors de la première grande exposition new-yorkaise de 1969, Harlem on my mind, au MET.
Nous proposons donc dans cette communication de poser la question de la relation de la photographie à la mémoire collective de la minorité noire américaine.

[1] « Quelqu’un quelque part veut votre photo » était le slogan qui décorait le studio de photographie d’Allen Edward Cole à Cleveland à partir des années 1920.

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