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Light and Air The Photography of Bayard Wootten (review)

Light and Air The Photography of Bayard Wootten By Jerry w. Cotten University of North Carolina Press, 1998 253 pp. Cloth, $37.50 The North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina Library in Chapel Hill owns over 97,000 negatives of photographs taken by the Wootten-Moulton Studio, a New Bern-Chapel Hill photographic business in operation from 1906 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 and Air examines the career of Bayard Wootten within the broader history of twentieth-century photography and reproduces a selection of 136 photographs, mostly from the 1930s. These are images of the South: landscapes, wooden cabins, a plantation house, but mostly "black and white Americans in the lower reaches of society." Have we seen their faces before? Some were published as illustrations for books, notably Muriel Earley Sheppard's Cabins in the Laurel (1935), Charles Morrow Wilson's Backwoods America (1934), and Olive Tilford Dargan's From My Highest Hill: 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, of African Americans in Charleston and Appalachian mountaineers taken by Doris Ulmann, those of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans for the Farm Security Administration, or those of Margaret Bourke-White in Erskine Caldwell's You Have Seen Their Faces (1937). Each of these 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 of painting, making use of mood, 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 title). Cotten makes astute comparisons between the work of the "realists" and Wootten's slightly softer, gentler images. But the distinction between the 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 of the 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 of her generation. Her half-brother, George C. Moulton, soon joined her and handled much of the 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 of the Photographic Association of America. She remained a member of its Women's Federation and kept in touch with the Pictorial Photographers of America until that organization's demise around 1920. A few years later Wootten visited the Appalachian School (now Penland) in the mountains of western 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 school's catalog and in turn grew to love the region and its people. Her first national recognition came in 1932 when she exhibited forty prints of landscapes and portraits at the Fine Arts Theatre in Boston. The Boston papers, as well as the Charlotte Observer, praised the "natural" and "picturesque" quality of her studies of mountain people. …