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.

Doris 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 the oil pigment process, a method requiring painstaking manual control and producing images with a textured, almost gritty quality.

Why did Ulmann persist with oil printing as late as 1927? Research on her work is scarce, and commentary on these prints nearly absent. She may have first encountered the process 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.”

These early oil prints stand as vital markers in Ulmann’s artistic evolution, bridging her pictorialist experiments and her later role as a documentary photographer with a cultural and social mission.

Printed by the artist with original mat, print process undetermined, print mounted on tissue paper. Pencil signature "Doris U. Jaeger" lower right and red monogram in right corner of photo, dated "1918".