This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 6/1/2023
[ULLMANN, Doris (1882-1934), photographer]. -- PETERKIN, Julia (1880-1961). Roll, Jordan, Roll. New York: Robert O. Ballou, [1933].
8vo. 70 photogravures after photography by Ulmann. Original blue cloth, gilt-lettered spine, black top stain (spine gently sunned, tiny marred hole and early ownership signature on ffep); original dust jacket (rear panel detached but present, chipping at extremities, some separation to front flap). Laid in with a contemporary newspaper clipping dated 1933 reviewing this book.
FIRST TRADE EDITION of one of the great documentary photobooks of the 1930s, examining the Gullah descendants of African American slaves living in South Carolina and Georgia in the 1930s. “Ullman's soft-focus photos - rendered as tactile as charcoal drawings in the superb gravure reproductions here - straddle Pictorialism and Modernism... many of her pictures would not be out of place in a Farm Security Administration photo essay” (Roth, The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century pp. 78-9). Blockson 3932.