Portrait of Miss Katy, South Carolina

about 1929–1931

Medium

Platinum print

Dimensions

20.6 × 15.5 cm

Status

In Museum Collection

Collect24 Art ID

C24-514280

Doris Ulmann photographed Miss Katy for Julia Peterkin’s *Roll, Jordan, Roll* (1933) ([https://primo.getty.edu](https://primo.getty.edu/primo-explore/fulldisplay?docid=GETTY_ALMA21132793620001551&context=L&vid=GRI&lang=en_US&search_scope=COMBINED&adaptor=Local%20Search%20Engine&tab=all_gri&query=any,contains,julia%20peterkin&mode=basic)). The text adjacent to the portrait, a first-person account delivered, as in much of the book, in dialect, tells of the pain in Miss Katy's life caused by the working of roots (a conjuring) and of the consolation that the pipe and praying have brought her. Both Peterkin (1880-1961) and Ulmann were concerned with this woman as an individual, not just as the timeworn type of peasant portrayed by English and French Realist painters of the nineteenth century. She is, actually, one of the few people pictured in *Roll, Jordan, Roll* who can be fully identified. According to Susan Williams, Peterkin's biographer, Miss Katy Jones had been the subject of an earlier Peterkin sketch called "Roots Work," which became a kind of starting point for a cycle of short stories published in 1924 as *Green Thursday*. Jones died in 1932 at the age of sixty-five, one yea…