The “Vanishing Types”of Doris Ulmann

In her scarlet silk dress and natty little red hat, Doris Ulmann would have looked right at home in her Park Avenue studio. There, Ulmann, with her ever-present gold-tipped cigarette in her hand, had spent much of the 1920s photographing the literary elite. She had created portraits of Robert Frost, H. L. Mencken, and Edna St. Vincent Millay among countless others, each in her distinctive and laborious pictorialism style.

Sometimes in her travels, Ulmann bemoaned her inability to...