Bayard wootten biography examples
•
Through Her Lens: The Nearly Forgotten Photographer Who Really Saw the South
Twenty-five years ago, Jerry Cotten stood in a private cemetery in Little Switzerland, North Carolina, a small mountain town nestled along the Blue Ridge Parkway. The now retired photographic archivist was searching for the grave of Elizabeth Hollifield, a woman featured in one of his favorite photographs. &#;She projects an image of serenity and strength,&#; he says. Scrawled in pencil on the back of the portrait is a note: &#;Last summer I drove by her cabin many times, and she was always sitting in the door, waiting,&#; Bayard Wootten, the photographer, wrote.
Elizabeth Hollifield of Little Switzerland.
Cotten discovered Wootten’s photographs in the early s when he worked for the North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He spent hours sorting through images acquired by the Wilson Special Collections Library, home to the largest assortment of Wootten’s work. Out
•
Bayard Wootten ()
Born in New Bern, North Carolina, Bayard Wootten is one of the American South&#;s most significant early female photographers. She was descended from a prominent southern family; her maternal grandmother was writer and poet Mary Bayard Clarke and her father had a photography business, and galleries in Raleigh and Goldsboro. After taking classes at the New Bern Collegiate Institute, Bayard Wootten attended the North Carolina State Normal and Industrial School, now UNC-Greensboro, where she received most of her instruction in art. Wootten pursued drawing and painting in college but took up photography in
From until her retirement in , Wootten operated a successful studio in Chapel Hill, managed by her half-brother, George Moulton. This arrangement allowed her pictorial style of photography to blossom. As one of the earliest photographers to use the medium as fine art, Wootten was acclaimed for her fine details, thoughtful compositions and artistic expression. Bay
•
In , a photographer in North Carolina lent a 4×5 camera to a divorced single mother. He shook his head and muttered several times that she&#x;d never make the grade. One year later, he viewed her as his competitor and took back his equipment. So, Bayard (pronounced BY-ard) Wootten, who until then had supported her family bygd selling small paintings and drawings, went out and bought her own camera.
She made more than a million images in her life, said Anthony Lilly, who has written a biopic of Ms. Wootten using her old typewriter. She illustrated six books with her photography. Most of the government buildings in North and South Carolina used her wall mural photography. It was pictorial photography.
Though known as a pictorialist (more of an art photographer than a straightforward documentarian), Ms. Wootten strayed from the unspoken rules set by Alfred Stieglitz, the father of pictorialism, in the early 20th century. Unlike Mr. Stieglitz, who was