Ruth Bernhard

Ruth Bernhard,Skull and Rosary Ruth Bernhard,At the Pool, Vintage Ruth Bernhard,At Rest Ruth Bernhard,Two Forms Ruth Bernhard,Spanish Dancer Ruth Bernhard,Perspective II Ruth Bernhard,Draped Torso, Vintage Ruth Bernhard,Luminous Body Ruth Bernhard, Sand Dune Ruth Bernhard,Draped Torso Ruth Bernhard,At the Pool

Individual prices are listed below the larger image view.
Please call Oswald Gallery Jackson at 888.898.0077 for ordering and delivery information.

Hailed by Ansel Adams as “the greatest photographer of the nude,” Ruth Bernhard has lived a life that spans almost a century of passionate, ceaseless exploration of the magic of light to create form.

Daughter of the legendary graphic artist and type designer Lucian Bernhard, Ruth moved from her native Germany to New York at the age of twenty-one. There, her…artistic life blossomed among the designers and artists of the new modernist movement who inhabited the vibrant cultural center that was New York in the thirties. A 1935 encounter in California with photographer Edward Weston led to her passion for black-and-white photography as an artistic medium, and thus began her unending commitment to the making of exquisitely perfected photographs. Ruth moved to San Francisco in the fifties, where she established her place in the photographic world by producing a unique body of work focused on the female nude and an equally compelling series of still-lifes.

At a time when women were rarely acknowledged in photography, Ruth carved out her own trademark style. With such zest for life and art, she often ignored society’s conventions related to age or gender. This individuality combined with great wisdom has attracted generations of devoted students. For over forty years Ruth enjoyed a distinguished career as a revered workshop teacher and lecturer. Ruth’s work has been exhibited all over the world, including exhibitions at: The Friends of Photography, San Francisco, in 1980 and 2000; The Art Museum, Princeton University, in 1996 and 2000; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1981 and 1984; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1967.

“Each time I make a photograph I celebrate the life I love and the beauty I know and the happiness I have experienced. All my photographs are made like that responding to my intuition… After all these years, I am still motivated by the radiance that light creates when it transforms an object into something magical. What the eye sees is an illusion of what is real. The black-and-white image is yet another transformation. What exactly exists, we may never know.”

from Ruth Bernhard: Between Art and Life, by Margaretta K. Mitchell