Ulmann, Doris & Julia Peterkin | Roll, Jordan, Roll; first edition, deluxe issue

Ulmann, Doris & Julia Peterkin

Roll, Jordan, Roll. New York: Robert O. Ballou, [1933]

Large 4to (286 x 208 mm). 90 hand-pulled photogravures, some original tissue guards, one additional photogravure signed by Ullman in pencil in the lower margin laid-in; lightly foxed throughout, with some of the typical offsetting from photos, a few plates unobtrusively soiled; additional gravure with mostly marginal foxing and browning, wear to outer edges. Publisher's half cream linen over brown paper beveled boards, covers stamped in blind, spine lettered in gilt, top edge gilt; lacking the original slipcase, boards lightly scuffed and marked, small chip to paper along top edge, spine lightly soiled, gilt title rubbed, hinged reinforced with cloth tape.

First edition, deluxe issue, number 61 of 350 copies, signed by Julia Peterkin and Doris Ulmann on the colophon, "One of the most singular documentary photobooks of the 1930s"(Parr/Badger).

"Ulmann's photographic collaboration with Julia Peterkin focuses on the lives of former slaves and their descendants on a plantation in the Gullah coastal region of South Carolina. Peterkin, a popular novelist who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1929, was born in South Carolina and raised by a black nursemaid who taught her the Gullah dialect before she learned standard English. She married the heir to Lang Syne, one of the state's richest plantations, which became the setting for Roll, Jordan, Roll. 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" (Roth)

REFERENCE:

Parr/Badger, The Photobook I, p. 135; Andrew Roth, The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century, pp. 78-79