Ruth Bernhard ~ Seeing Lifesavers in a Different Light

What to photograph today? Some of us walk the streets. Others take photos of loved ones. Some of us are drawn to flowers. Ruth Bernhard was drawn to light early on. Armed with her first camera and with little money, she evidently bought a package of Lifesavers and some straws. This was back in 1930 when she was twenty-five years old.

Here in her own words are how her career started...

“I became a photographer by accident, after I came to the United States. When I arrived in 1927, I had no job, no profession, and no money. My father supported me while I learned English, but in 1929, he announced that it was time for me to have a job. An acquaintance by the name of Ralph Steiner, who worked for the magazine The Delineator, was looking for a darkroom assistant. That is where I learned to be a photographer. However, the job itself was very uninteresting. After six months I was fired. I used the ninety dollars I received as severance pay to purchase an 8 x 10 view camera, a tripod, and other darkroom equipment. With only pennies left, I purchased straws and Lifesavers at the dime store, which became the inspiration for my first two photographs”.

So there you have it. You just don't know where life will take you. From a package of Lifesavers, Ruth Bernhard lived a full life, all 101 years of it. To end the week of Ruth Bernhard here on Fifty Two Pieces, I'm reposting her Recipe for Life.

Bernhard, but not Bernhard

I am trying to decide what to write today, about Ruth, and as I think and stare at the screen Kate Burns enters the office. She says "Not to be nosy, but this is a postcard and I can't help but read it...who is K-1 and K2?" Then she carefully drops the postcard from over the pony wall and it floats down to me. It is Heinz Hajek-Halke and it is the most beautiful image I have seen all day. It is from LaValle, and she writes Berlin is surreal. I look up at Kate. "K-1 and K-2 come from a Frank Ohara poem, and they mean keenest." Kate smiles and shows me her postcard "I got a sexy woman."
I know Ruth Bernhard would draw attention to this postcard, so it is the image of the day. Bernhard and Hajek-Halke were in an exhibition together called Nude Visions earlier this year in the Munchen Stadtmuseum.
Were you there K-2?

Ruth Bernhard ~ Nudes and Light

Two days ago I was immersed in Ruth Bernhard and her capturing of light, quite phenomenal. In addition to Doorknob, the Portland Art Museum also holds in its collection, Nude in Box. The power of her work was still with me when I visited the Galleria dell'Accademia to see amongst other works of art Michelangelo's David. Lucky for me the Accademia has extended "Perfection in Form", an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe's work. Mapplethorpe's photographs are hung in the same gallery as the David as well as other rooms. Bernhard and Mapplethorpe's light became entwined in my vision. As I walked among the nudes and still life images I kept wondering what Mapplethorpe and Bernhard would have said to each other if they had met. That same question applies to Mapplethorpe and Michelangelo. The spokeswoman for the Accademia had this to say about Mapplethorpe and Michelangelo, two controversial artists of their times.



For those of you interested in some of the photographs from the Accademia exhibit, click here. And last but not least, I'm including a few of Bernhard's nudes (on the left) next to a few of Mapplethorpes' nudes (on the right). I think Ruth and Robert would have had a good time talking about photography and life. ...

Bernhard, the Poet

"I never question what to do, it tells me what to do. The photographs make themselves with my help." Ruth Bernhard
There is no doubt her photographs of female nudes are sexy, but she never thought of them that way. Bernhard said all her work was about light and shapes, which are the poetry of an image. She said light was her paintbrush and paint. This photograph of Bernhard was taken by one of her last students, they were on their way from class back to Ruth's accomodations on Whidbey Island. The student asked Bernhard if she could take a photo, Ruth said "make it snappy." The student got out of the car and ran around to Ruth's side just in time to see her strike this pose.
"The ground we walk on, the plants and creatures, the clouds above constantly dissolving into new formations - each gift of nature possessing its own radiant energy, bound together by cosmic harmony."
Bernhard read light as if it were poetry and described the world as if she were seeing it through a viewfinder. Her reverence for nature reminds me of my favorite poet, Mary Oliver. Mary Oliver's partner was the photographer Molly Malone Cook. They worked side by side for years intertwining their two disciplines. Oliver said of Cook's photographs that they taught the beginner poet "to see, with searching attention, and compassion." I feel the same as I read about Bernhard, I am taking a fresh look at photographs I've seen before.

Ruth Bernhard ~ Relationships

Here in Firenze it's almost 9:00 am on 11 Octobre 2009. A quick check of the internet before we go out for our walk netted me the weather (mostly cloudy with a few sprinkles) and some Facebook time. Just for fun I typed in Ruth Bernhard and found that she has a page on Facebook.

Bernhard was a complex person and that complexity was exhibited in her relationships with people as well as her art. Lifting from the Facebook content is this summary of her life. Marriage early on with her women partners would have been impossible. Why she and Price Rice never married is open for discussion.

By the late-1920s, while living in Manhattan, Bernhard was heavily involved in the lesbian sub-culture of the artistic community, becoming friends with photographer Berenice Abbott and her lover, critic Elizabeth McCausland. By 1934 Bernhard was almost exclusively photographing women in the nude.[citation needed] It would be this art form for which she would eventually become best known. ... By 1944 she had met and became involved with artist and designer Eveline (Evelyn) Phimister. The two moved in together, and remained together for the next ten years. They first moved to Carmel, California, where Bernhard worked with Group f/64. Soon, finding Carmel a difficult place in which to earn a living, they moved to Hollywood where she fashioned a career as a commercial photographer. In 1953, they moved to San Francisco.

Ruth Bernhard was full of life and continued to have relationships until her death in 2006. These included Price Rice, an African-American Air Force colonel 10 years her junior, whom she had met when he took one of her classes in the seventies. Price accompanied Bernhard while she taught, lectured and traveled. Bernhard had stopped producing new work because of impaired concentration due to carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a faulty household heater. When Price died in 1999, she began a relationship with the woman photographer Chris Mende. They were together until Bernhard’s death in 2006.

Look carefully at Bernhard's work and you can see the interweaving of those relationships in the fabric of her art. I'm out the door now to catch the light here in Firenze. Ciao.

Ruth Bernhard ~ Doorknob

Reflections always attract me. They stop me in my tracks whether I'm outside or inside. Seeing the reflected light in Ruth Bernhard's Doorknob photograph not only made me take time to look closely at her image, it also compelled me to find out more about the woman who had taken the image. Who was this woman?

Ruth Bernhard lived to be 101. She was a photographer and a teacher of photography most of her life. She knew Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. Ansel Adams said she was the best photographer of nudes ever. She and Edward Weston were very close friends. Close enough that Weston's wife was at times unhappy with their professional rapport. This story about Weston and Bernhard always makes me smile...

"Ted Hartwell delights in telling the story of his visit to Ruth Bernhard's home in San Francisco. He's the photography curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA). He was in her kitchen when a tiny portrait caught his eye. Stuck on the fridge door, it was a younger Ruth, with her hand up to her cheek. "Just a small print," he says. "Maybe 2 and a half inches square, signed by the great Edward Weston. On her refrigerator! Amazing! Amazing! It's worth a fortune!" The whole Ruth Bernhard story seems studded with tiny treasures, and happy opportunities."

Bernard's story can also be told by this recipe for life...


I especially liked her answer to the question about never having married...

"Well, first of all, there wasn’t anybody there! There wasn’t anybody there I could bond with. I didn’t make any friendships that were love affairs. There were people that I liked, but I didn’t have any romance. I had close friends, but no romances. So there wasn’t any question of marriage and family. There was a young man in New York who always felt that he would be my ‘future ex-husband,’ but we never had a romance. And I have had very good, wonderful friends, photographers and artists, but that was as far as it went."

You have to love someone who kept men as future ex-husbands.

Today's image of Ruth Bernhard was taken by John Reiff and is part of a Flickr set. Her image reflects out as does the light from the doorknob. Like Amy, I'm looking forward to this week. Photography inspires me and Ruth Bernhard is an idol.

Ruth Bernhard, Doorknob

The piece of the week is Ruth Bernhard's Doorknob of 1975. The museum acquired this gelatin silver print in 2005 by the work of the late great Terry Toedtemeier. Dan Wark recalls Terry talking about this image, excitedly explaining how Bernhardt had seen the light hit the knob that way, how she hadn't managed to capture the shot with the sun moving as it tends to do. She watched that spot for an entire year until the day came when the sun hit the doorknob again, producing the shot just as she'd remembered.
Bernhardt was born in 1905, ten years after Dorothea Lange and 22 years after Imogen Cunningham- all were members of group f.64 a modernist group of photographers in california in the 1930's. I mention these other women because I have had the great pleasure of seeing their work recently. On a trip I took to Seattle a few weekends ago I saw the photography of Cunningham. Sometimes, for me, the measure of a good museum is how long I am in it before I shed a tear. At SAM it took until I was face to face with Frida Kahlo, shot by Imogen Cunningham in 1931.
Today I had the good fortune of hearing Linda Gordon speak on the PSU campus about the show that opens tonight at the Littman Gallery presenting over 30 of Dorothea Lange's WPA prints from Oregon shot during the depression. I didn't even have to get beyond the slideshow before the tears hit.
I'm looking forward to a week of feeling blessed to be a woman.