251 pp. With 71 photogravure plates from photographs by Doris Ulmann. 8vo. Blue cloth, spine lettered in gilt. First Trade Edition.
Chronicles 1930s African-Americans living on Peterkin's plantation along the South Carolina coast. Peterkin is best known for her 1929 Pulitzer Prize winning novel “Scarlet Sister Mary.” Ulmann's photographs encompass a wide range of subjects from chain gangs in their striped uniforms, to people undergoing stream-side baptism, to farm workers, and pipe-smoking, turban-topped grandmothers. Described by Parr and Badger [Vol. 1, p. 135] as “Ulmann’s soft-focus photos, rendered as tactile as charcoal drawings in the superb gravure reproductions here straddle Pictorialism and Modernism even as they appear to dissolve into memory. A classic and dramatic narrative account of the African-American life in the Southern States as witnessed by the author. Roth 101, pp. 78-79.
