By the 1920s, pictorialism and its soft, painterly printing techniques had largely fallen out of fashion. Yet some photographers continued to value labor-intensive processes—photogravure, carbon, gum, and oil—for their expressive potential.

Seeking to imitate the work of American and European Impressionist painters, pictorial photographers of the 1890s and early 1900s created numerous oil pigment prints. Charcoal-like and “grainy” in appearance, these images helped legitimize the pictorialists’ claim that photography could stand as fine art. The process, however, was notoriously difficult and time-consuming, requiring a glass plate negative and careful manual control.

By the time Doris Ulmann became active, oil pigment work had largely fallen into disfavor. She nonetheless created more than 150 oil prints between 1917 and 1927. Ulmann is best known for her luminous platinum prints, with their warm, extended tonal range, and for the photogravures that widely reproduced them. Less understood is her sustained engagement with oil printing, which produced images with a textured, almost gritty quality.

Why did Ulmann persist with the process as late as 1925? Research on her work is scarce, and commentary on these prints nearly absent. She may have first encountered the method as a student at the Clarence White School, where it was part of the curriculum. Yet her continued use suggests something deeper: perhaps she found in its rough surfaces a fitting language to portray the “types” of rural America—faces marked by labor, endurance, and the intensity of lived experience. As she observed, “the face of an older person, perhaps not beautiful in the strictest sense, is usually more appealing than the face of a younger person who has scarcely been touched by life.”

Printed by the artist, pencil signature "Doris Ulmann" to lower right corner. Circa 1925.