Photographs by pioneering North Carolina photographer Bayard Wootten have been given new life thanks

Photographs by pioneering North Carolina photographer Bayard Wootten have been given new life thanks to author Jerry Cotten and the University Libraries’ Digital Production Center.

Bayard Wootten was North Carolina’s most important photographer of the early 20th century. Over her career, Wootten produced photographs in a variety of styles. Perhaps her most significant contribution to photography was the work she did documenting poor rural people during the 1930s.

Jerry Cotten’s 1998 biography of Wootten, Light and Air, was recently republished. Staff in the Libraries’ Digital Production Center spent about a year on digital clean-up, preparing the images for publication.  

For example, in the first set of photographs, the text on the top of the box at the boys’ feet wasn’t even visible in the 1998 edition of the book. The new edition is full of such revelations, heightening the power of Wootten’s images.