Ruth Bernhard, photographer, 101
Ponty
December 20, 2006
Ruth Bernhard, a pioneer among women photographers who was best known
for her abstract images of female nudes, has died. She was 101.
A resident of San Francisco since the early 1950s, Bernhard died at her
home Monday of natural causes, her business manager, Mary Ann
Helmholtz, said Tuesday.
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In a photographic style marked by dramatic lighting, pared-down
compositions and materials from everyday life, Bernhard created a small
but important body of work. She became known for her still-life
photographs as well as for nudes, and credited her friend and mentor
Edward Weston as her main inspiration.
"I had not respected photography until I met him," she once said of
Weston. "I began then to take myself seriously as an artist."
She refined her technique under his influence starting in the
mid-1930s.
"Ruth saw photography as a way to heighten reality, as did Weston,"
said Arthur Ollman, former director of the Museum of Photographic Arts
in San Diego, in a 2005 interview with The Times. "She made the usual
seem extraordinary."
To achieve that effect, Bernhard mixed settings and subjects in
unexpected ways. "Embryo" (1934) shows a female nude curled up in an
oversized steel bowl. "In the Box, Horizontal" (1962) is of a female
nude reclining snugly inside a cardboard packing box. Bernhard brought
the same odd combination of elements to her still-life photographs. In
"Lifesaver" (1930), pieces of candy roll across a flat surface like
runaway tires.
Some critics saw a thread of surrealism in her work. Others referred to
her fresh way of looking at the ordinary.
Bernhard was a studio photographer almost exclusively and frequently
spent days setting up a composition. She often took only one photograph
from one specific angle rather than trying different light settings and
angles. She was passionate about her work but not prolific.
"It was an unusual success story," said Stephen White, Bernhard's
photography dealer in Los Angeles from the late 1970s to the '80s.
"Ruth had a long career, but the range of her work is fairly limited."
She was not as widely known as her California contemporaries Imogen
Cunningham, Ansel Adams and Weston. But she was well-regarded in
photography circles. "She holds a unique place for the way she
photographed female nudes years before the feminists of the 1970s,"
White said in a 2005 interview with The Times.
The results were not lusty or blatantly sexual.
"Ruth's female nudes show an empathy," her current art dealer, Peter
Fetterman, said Tuesday. "When a man photographs a female nude, there
is more of an objectification. With Ruth, there is a tenderness."
Bernhard once explained her approach in feminist terms. "Woman has been
the subject of much that is sordid and cheap, especially in
photography," she told Margaretta K. Mitchell, author of "Ruth Bernhard
Between Art and Life" (2000). "To raise, to elevate, to endorse with
timeless reverence the image of woman has been my mission."
Few women of Bernhard's generation managed to make any sort of career
as photographers, a profession dominated by men during most of the last
century. Her near-contemporaries Dorothea Lange and Margaret
Bourke-White worked as photojournalists. Bernhard supported herself
with advertising work, shooting catalogs and taking portraits of
clients.
Images she created for her own sake, not on assignment, had a similarly
clean, graphic quality. In "Two Leaves" (1952), each leaf stands on
end, overlapping, to call attention to the differences. Another work,
"Shell in Silk" (1939), shows a pristine clamshell polished and lighted
like a stone sculpture.
Observers came to see Bernhard's artistic work as her personal
reflections on everyday wonders.
"Ruth had a palpable reverence for life," Ollman said. "She sensed that
something far greater than her was powering her and all of life."
Born in Berlin in 1905, the photographer began her career in New York
City in the late 1920s after following her father, Lucian Bernhard, to
this country. He was a successful graphic artist and typographer, known
for designing the Bernhard font that is still in use. Bernhard's father
divorced her mother, Gertrude, when Ruth was 2, but he remained a
powerful influence on his daughter's life and career. He remarried and
had three more children, all sons. Ruth's half brothers, Karl and
Alexander, survive her. She never married and had no children.
Ruth studied typography and art history at the Academy of Fine Arts in
Berlin before she joined her father in New York City, where he helped
her find work. She was a darkroom assistant for a women's magazine for
only a few months. She left to become a freelancer, working for her
father's clients and occasionally for him. Years later she recalled
photographing nude models draped in sheer fabrics in her father's
studio. In one case, he used the image to help him design a fabric
print, Bernhard said.