Light and Air: The Photography of Bayard Wootten by Jerry W. Cotten

LIGHT AND AIR
New Book Highlights Work of One of South's First Female Professional Photographers

"The camera is not a free agent as brush or pencil, but relentlessly records things as they are. So the artist must bring to her aid strong contrasts of light and shade, artistic grouping and rhythmic lines. To use a camera as a means of artistic expression, a certain quality of spirit must be brought to aid light and air." --Bayard Wootten, 1926

Chapel Hill, N.C.-- A trailblazer for women photographers in the South, North Carolina's Bayard Wootten (1875-1959) overcame economic hardship, gender discrimination, and the obscurity of a small-town upbringing to become the state's most significant early female photographer. Her work encompassed dramatic landscapes and beautiful gardens, as University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill library photo archivist Jerry W. Cotten illustrates in his new book on Wootten and her photography.

However, Cotten writes, "[her] most notable accomplishment was the creation of a photographic record of black and white Americans in the lower reaches of society--people whom other photographers often ignored."

Light and Air: The Photography of Bayard Wootten offers a stunning presentation of the life and work of one of North Carolina's first female professional photographers. Cotten presents Wootten as an advocate of equality for women who combined an artistic vision with determination and a love of adventure to forge a distinguished career spanning half a century.

To be published in November by the University of North Carolina Press ($37.50 hardcover), Light and Air features 190 illustrations, including 136 duotone reproductions of Wootten's photographs taken in North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, and Tennessee--many of which have never before been published.

Light and Air portrays the story of a strong and talented woman whose legacy lies not in the fact that she was one of the South's first female photographers but that she, unlike most, sought to capture the true soul of the rural south--black and white working people in their day-to-day lives.

Originally trained as an artist, Wootten worked in photography's pictorial tradition, emphasizing artistic effect in her images at a time when realistic and documentary photography increasingly dominated the medium. Traveling throughout North Carolina and surrounding states, she turned the artistry of her eye and lens on the people and places she encountered.

Having opened a studio in her hometown of New Bern in 1905, Wootten moved to Chapel Hill in 1928, where her clients included the University of North Carolina. Between 1932 and 1941, she also provided photographs for six books--including Cabins in the Laurel (UNC Press, 1991), Old Homes and Gardens of North Carolina, and Charleston: Azaleas and Old Bricks--lectured extensively, and exhibited her photographs as far away as New York and Massachusetts.

Though author Jerry Cotten first stumbled upon Wootten's work unwittingly, he was soon transfixed by the simplistic beauty of her photographs. "An observer could absorb these photographs with little effort," Cotten writes of Wootten's work, "the prints had a symmetry, a character, and a simplicity that were pleasing. They looked natural yet finely tuned, as if part of a well-crafted story."

The artistic merits of Wootten's work, coupled with her unique coverage of obscure people and places in the rural South, captured Cotten's interest and inspired him to compile much of her work in one volume. "Wootten's artistic skills, her success as an early woman photographer, and a career spanning half a century," Cotten tells us, "have secured her place as a dominant figure in the photographic history of North Carolina."


book description | table of contents | Wootten website at UNC-CH


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