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A Day of Rest

Happy Labor Day weekend!

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, Labor Day "constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country." Rural workers paused for this photograph by Doris Ulmann.

A native of New York City, Ulmann had a diverse education that included photography classes at the Clarence H. White School of Photography. Independently wealthy, she became a professional portrait photographer in New York. Her subjects included friends such as Ruth St. Denis, Albert Einstein, and President Calvin Coolidge.

Ulmann is best known, however, for her photographic projects in the Appalachian Mountains of the American South. Taking the same large view camera and soft-focus lens that she had used for her New York portraits, she traveled thousands of miles through this region during the summers of the 1920s and early 1930s, until her death in 1934. Assisted by her friend the folklorist and singer John Jacob Niles, Ulmann sought to document what she believed was America's vanishing cultural past.

If photographs really turn your crank, then check out our online photography collection Helios.

Source: Merry A. Foresta. American Photographs: The First Century (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art with the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996).

Pictured: Doris Ulmann, 1882–1934, Two Men in Doorway, with Tools, about 1930, platinum print on paper mounted on paperboard, 6 1/4 x 8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs Collection made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment.