This subseries contains files by and about Ruth Bernhard, organized and maintained by the Princeton University Art Museum until their transfer in 2013. These files contain sorted original correspondence, both business and personal, as well as agreements, publicity materials, and other documents related to Bernhard's exhibitions, publications, appearances, workshops, and auctions, organized chronologically within each category. Materials cover most of Bernhard's career, from her early professional work for the Museum of Modern Art's Machine Art catalog in 1934 through the late 1990s.

In addition to personal and professional correspondence, including with other known photographers, this subseries also contains nearly complete chronological runs of exhibition announcements, auction catalogs, articles about Bernhard, and publications and essays by Bernhard. Sizable runs of workshop announcements, brochures, class materials, and student essays are also included.

Due to the artificial nature of these files, correspondence between the Princeton University Art Museum and other parties related to specific subject files on Bernhard are often filed alongside original materials. Also included are files documenting the transfer of Bernhard's archive to the Princeton University Art Museum in 1996, plans for an accompanying exhibition of her work at Princeton in the same year, as well as correspondence with the executors of her estate concerning the archive after Bernhard's death in 2006.

Of note is the complete unpublished manuscript for The Eye Beyond, a book project Bernhard conceived of in the 1960s, based on the idea of the camera as a tool of self-exploration. Though the book never came to fruition in print form, its main concepts were recycled in many of Bernhard's later workshops.