Ruth Bernhard

Ruther Bernhard discovered photography in New York

Ruth Bernhard was born near Berlin on 14 October 1905. The daughter of typographer and poster painter Lucian Bernhard (1883-1972), she maintained a close relationship with her father after her parents' early divorce and was greatly encouraged and supported by him in her artistic endeavours. She was thus able to study art history and typography at the Berlin University of the Arts from 1925 to 1927 before following her father to New York City, and found work in the USA as an assistant to the photographer Ralph Steiner (1899-1986) at the magazine Delineator. Steiner soon terminated the employment relationship due to what he saw as Bernhard's unsatisfactory performance, but the severance pay she received enabled the young artist to buy her own camera. At the end of the 1920s, Ruth Bernhard was active in the lesbian subculture of the Manhattan art scene and became friends with the photographer Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) and her partner, the art critic Elizabeth McCausland (1899-1965).

Successful career as advertising and art photographer

Ruth Bernhard began photographing naked women in the sexually permissive environment of the New York artistic milieu off the early 1930s. In 1935, she had an unplanned encounter with Edward Weston (1886-1958) on the beach in Santa Monica, whose pictures made a deep impression on her. Bernhard's admiration for Weston went so far that she even moved to California for a while, where he lived. In 1939, she returned to New York for eight years, where she met Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), and in 1944, began a relationship with the designer Eveline (Evelyn) Phimister (1908-1996), with whom she moved to California. She began a career as a commercial photographer in Hollywood, and in 1953, the couple moved to San Francisco, where Ruth Bernhard met renowned fellow photographers such as Ansel Adams (1902-1984), Imogen Cunningham (1883-1976), Minor White (1908-1976) and Wynn Bullock (1902-1975).

Exposed female bodies in black and white

Ruth Bernhard created what is probably her most famous photograph in 1962: Two Forms shows the naked bodies of a black and a white woman pressed together, who were also lovers in real life. Bernhard photographed almost exclusively in black and white, with nothing having survived of her experiments with colour photography. In addition to her famous nudes, she also occasionally photographed other subjects such as an illustrated book about the famous cable cars of San Francisco which she published with Melvin Van Peebles (1932-2021). For the pictures in this book, she not only deviated from her usual subject matter, but also changed her way of working: While she usually photographed almost exclusively in her studio and focused on sophisticated lighting moods, here she took pictures that showed the inner workings of the cable cars.

Ruth Bernhard died in San Francisco on 18 December 2006.