Bernhard, Ruth

Ruth Bernhard was a German-born American photographer best known for her complex black-and-white still lifes and classical photographs of the female nude. Born in Berlin in 1905, Bernhard followed her father, the graphic designer Lucian Bernhard, to New York City in 1927, after two years at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin. In New York, Bernhard photographed commercially and independently, while becoming heavily involved with the lesbian subculture of the city's art community. Lifesavers, her first published still life photograph, appeared in Advertising Arts in January, 1931. During her early years in New York, Bernhard also briefly worked for Ralph Steiner at The Delineator magazine and produced the photography for Machine Art, the first exhibition catalog published by the Museum of Modern Art, in 1934. As Bernhard recounts in her memoirs, what would become a life-long study of the female nude began during the shoot for this catalog, when Bernhard asked a friend to pose nude inside of a large industrial stainless steel bowl to make the shot more interesting.

Bernhard met the photographer Edward Weston on a trip to California in 1935, an event which became a major catalyst for her career. Her first solo show was held at the Jake Zeitlin Gallery in Los Angeles in 1936, after which time she frequently traveled between New York, California, and other locations to shoot, including Florida, where she worked with conchologist Jean Schwengel to photograph seashells. After working for the Women's Land Army on a New Jersey farm in support of the war effort in the early 1940s, Bernhard moved to Carmel, California in 1944, and later to San Francisco in 1953, where she became associated with the Modernist West Coast photographers of Group f/64, including Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange, Minor White, and her mentor, Edward Weston.

Working from her San Francisco studio in the 1950s and 1960s, Bernhard produced many of her most iconic images of the female nude, including Classic Torso (1952), In the Box, Horizontal (1962), and Two Forms (1963), which were later included in The Eternal Body, her first photographic monograph of nudes, published in 1986. Bernhard gained widespread recognition as an artist beginning in the 1970s, after her work was included in two major exhibitions, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's Women in Photography: A Historical Survey in 1975, and Recollections: Ten Women of Photography, which opened at the International Center of Photography in New York in 1979.

Just as she was coming into her fame, a near-fatal carbon monoxide poisoning incident in the mid-1970s left Bernhard unable to continue taking photographs. She made her last exposure in 1976, of a crushed teapot, though afterwards she continued to produce and sell prints of her earlier work with the help of printers Michael Kenna and Saïd Nuseibeh.

After the incident, teaching became Bernhard's primary activity, and she developed a loyal following of students drawn to her attention to vision and light. Beginning in 1961, Bernhard offered classes privately, as well as for the University of California Extension program, the Ansel Adams workshops in Yosemite, and the John Sexton workshops in Carmel, eventually becoming a highly respected instructor in the photographic medium and offering master classes internationally. Bernhard died in San Francisco in 2006 at age 101.