Name Bayard Wootten | ||
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Bayard Wootten
Mary Bayard Morgan Wootten (1875–1959) was an American photographer and pioneering suffragette. She is known for her photographs of people living in impoverished rural areas in her home state of North Carolina.
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Wootten was among the first aerial photographers, taking pictures of the landscape from early airplanes. She was also hired to paint what became the first trademarked logo for Pepsi-Cola.
The Life of Bayard Wootten
Biography
Wootten was born in New Bern, North Carolina in 1875. She attended New Bern public schools and then studied at the State Normal and Industrial College from 1892 to 1894. After college, she briefly taught art at the Arkansas School for the Deaf and the Georgia School for the Deaf. When her husband Charles Wootten abandoned her for the Gold Rush she returned home to New Bern to support her two sons by painting flowers on china and other items, including taxidermied animals. Having received basic instruction in photography from Edward Gerock, she set up her own photography studio in a shack next to her home on East Front Street in New Bern in 1904.
Building on the success of her New Bern studio, Wootten opened a second studio in 1920 with her half-brother George Moulton in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where they specialized in portrait photography for the Yackety-Yak, the yearbook for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as official photography for PlayMakers Repertory Company. She lived in Chapel Hill from 1928 to 1954. The theater work introduced her to the writer Thomas Wolfe, and she took his portrait.
Wootten became adventurous in finding new angles for images, once dangling off a cliff to take the perfect photograph of Linville Falls. In 1914 she became one of the first photographers to engage in aerial photography when she flew in an open-air Wright Brothers Model B airplane and took pictures of the landscape below. She became the first woman in the North Carolina National Guard.
Many of her photographs were used as illustrations for six books, including Backwoods America by Charles Morrow Wilson, 1934; Cabins in the Laurel by Muriel Sheppard, 1935; Old Homes and Gardens of North Carolina by Archibald Henderson, 1939; and From My Highest Hill by Olive Tilford Dargan, 1941.
Awards and exhibitions
Wootten received the North Carolina State Award for "Most Beautiful Photographs of Trees in America" from the American Forestry Association in 1934 for her photograph Live Oaks.
Her work has been exhibited at Harvard University, the Century of Progress Exposition, the Academy of Arts in Richmond, Virginia, and in numerous locations in North Carolina.