"Photographs of Southern Women by a North Carolina Woman Photographer"

The photos in this exhibit all come from the North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Women’s Studies thanks archivist Stephen Fletcher for his assistance in locating and digitizing these pictures. 
Bayard Wootten (Mary Bayard Morgan Wootten) was born in 1875 in New Bern, North Carolina.  Her artistic skills developed under the tutelage of her mother. She attended a school for women at Greensboro in the early 1890s and then accepted a teaching position at a school for the deaf in Arkansas. After her marriage failed, Wootten returned to North Carolina. At first she pursued drawing and painting as a cottage industry, but around 1904 the possibility of photographic orders replacing labor-intensive artwork steered her to the camera. Economic self-reliance was a necessity for Wootten.

Wootten, about 1914, at Camp Glenn, North Carolina, while working for the National Guard.

The pictorial movement in photography was in its heyday during the first decade of the twentieth century.  Wooten found pictorialism, with its emphasis on artistic content even at the expense of technical quality, a comfortable fit. She identified with the style throughout her half-century career, despite its steady decline in popularity after 1910.
Wootten experienced firsthand the gender discrimination within a profession overwhelmingly dominated by men. She went to a regional photographers' convention in 1907 and attended at least one national convention by 1912. Wootten found immediate kinship with the women photographers who in 1909 formed the Women's Federation of the Photographers' Association of America. Professional meetings and publications such as The Bulletin of Photography became forums for exchanging ideas with female colleagues and learning about their work. Wootten's membership in the Federation also fortified her sense of self as a woman photographer.
Significant recognition materialized for Wootten after she moved to Chapel Hill in 1928. During this period she actively pursued subjects that complemented her pictorial style to great advantage. Her work includes beautiful gardens and spectacular landscapes, but Wootten's most notable accomplishment was the creation of a photographic record of black and white Americans in the lower reaches of society--persons that other photographers often ignored.
During the first two decades of the twentieth century the efforts of Bayard Wootten and other activist women photographers helped establish a larger foothold for women in the photographic profession.