Doris Ulmann began her photographic career while attending the Clarence H. White School of Photography in New York—the first art photography school in the United States. There she worked in the Pictorialist tradition, which included embracing the “painterly” qualities of soft focus and manipulating surfaces. After undergoing a major surgery, Ulmann decided to pursue her interest in people “for whom life had not been a dance.” She began traveling throughout the southeastern United States documenting the folk traditions and people of the Appalachian Mountains. She made several sun-dappled portraits of this young girl (identified on other prints as “Kreiger girl”) in and around Berea, Kentucky.