“THE ART OF THE QUIET”

(ULMANN, Doris). The Appalachian Photographs of Doris Ulmann. Penland, North Carolina: Jargon, 1971. Quarto, original brown cloth, patterned endpapers, original photographic dust jacket. $400.

First edition of this warm tribute to Ulmann, with frontispiece and 63 finely screened, sepia-toned plates of Appalachian mountaineers, working men and women, farmers and moonshiners.

“These were the people she wanted to record for posterity. She feared they were disappearing.” Using large view cameras and glass plate negatives, Doris Ulmann produced an unparalleled record of Appalachia in the 1930s. “A wealthy New Yorker who had studied photography with Clarence White,” Ulmann was often accompanied on her travels through Appalachia by ethnomusicologist John Jacob Niles, whose essay within recalls their close friendship (Parr & Badger I:135). “Ulmann’s soft-focus photographs… straddle Pictorialism and Modernism even as they appear to dissolve into memory” (Roth, 78), producing what co-editor Jonathan Williams describes as an especially evocative “art of the quiet.” Also issued in paper wrappers, no priority established. This copy from the library of noted collector/publisher Daniel Berley, prominently associated with New York’s prestigious Lee Witkin Gallery. Library stamp on title page.

Book fine; light soiling, rubbing to spine lettering, minor tape repair to verso of bright, near-fine dust jacket.