Light and Air: The Photography of Bayard Wootten.

Light and Air: The Photography of Bayard Wootten. By Jerry W. Cotten. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 1998. Pp. xviii, 253. $37.50, ISBN 0-8078-2445-3.)

Bayard (pronounced "By-ard") Wootten was a southern woman photographer who created a body of work as noteworthy for its evocative, beautiful images as the subject matter it preserves. Born in 1875 in New Bern, North Carolina, Wootten was a pioneer in the profession, becoming a leader in the fledgling Women's Federation of the Photographers Association of America when it was formed in 1909. She combined commercial work and her own artistic efforts, as did many professional photographers, and used the paying clients to underwrite her artistic expressions. And like other commercial image-makers, she created both a documentary record based upon her many clients and a body of work made up of her own personal artistic vision. She was a "pictorialist," a photographer whose "overriding objective was to create an artistically beautiful image, even if mood eclipsed reality in the process" (p. 14). Wootten trusted composition and lighting to convey the mood she sought and manipulated her negatives and tinted her prints less than most members of the school. Although pictorialism gave way to straight photography during her lifetime, Wootten continued to work in the same style, using traditional artistic concepts to craft aesthetically pleasing and attractive images.

Light and Air contains a brief narrative by Jerry W. Cotten that both chronicles Wootten's life and career and seeks to contextualize her work. The photographer lived and worked in an area of the South frequented by Roy Stryker's Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers, and the most interesting aspect of Cotten's essay compares the works of the local pictorialist with the more famous FSA images of Depression-era misery. Viewing many of the same scenes and types of individuals, Wootten and the FSA photographers operated with very different agenda. There is no question that Wootten's vision of the South is more gentle, and that the people captured in her photographs exhibit far less of the stricken desperation evidenced by the FSA images. There is also an egalitarian quality in Wootten's photographs. The rural men and women in her work are more comfortable with the local photographer, who was no interloper in this world. They look directly at the camera and knowingly collaborate in creating the portrayal.

Wootten's beautifully produced sepia-toned images are the highlight of the book. Both landscapes and portraits are included and, while remaining true to the aesthetic of their pictorialist roots, these images convey the beauty of the landscape and the innate dignity of its inhabitants. The University of North Carolina Press is to be commended for producing such a wonderful book. From its striking design and production quality to Jerry Cotten's insightful and informative essay, Light and Air honors an important southern woman photographer and hints at the ways in which local commercial photographic archives can provide richly textured portraits of their communities.

PATRICIA BELLIS BIXEL Maine Maritime Academy