In 1933, Ulmann and author Julia Peterkin published a book called Roll, Jordan, Roll about Peterkin’s cotton plantation in South Carolina, which employed formerly enslaved people and their descendants. These two women, both wealthy and White, spent their careers documenting minority subcultures, often portraying them as generic archetypes. Peterkin even won the Pulitzer Prize for a book written in a caricatured dialect about Gullah Geechee people, descendants of enslaved Africans who through isolation maintained a unique West African–influenced culture.

Yet many of the photographs in Roll, Jordan, Roll transcend the project’s lopsided power dynamic and Peterkin and Ulmann’s ignorance and racism, presenting sensitive and moving scenes of self-possessed Black people working, socializing, and worshipping in a tightknit and supportive community. The project participates in a long and complicated history of artists portraying communities to which they don’t belong, provoking questions about representation, prejudice, and power.

—Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023)