Light and Air: The Photography of Bayard Wootten

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. This advocate of equality for women combined an artistic vision of photography with determination and a love of adventure to forge a distinguished career that spanned half a century. At the height of her renown, between 1932 and 1941, she provided photographs for six books, most notably Cabins in the Laurel, Old Homes and Gardens of North Carolina, and Charleston: Azaleas and Old Bricks. Popular as a lecturer in the Southeast, she exhibited her photographs as far away as New York and Massachusetts. Light and Air features 190 illustrations, including 136 duotone reproduction of Wootten's photographs taken in North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, and Tennessee - many of which have never before been published. Though she was an accomplished landscape and architectural photographer, some of Wootten's most notable images are the portraits she crafted of black and white Americans in the lower reaches of society, working people whom other photographers often ignored. These images are perhaps her most enduring legacy.