Ruth Orkin, Women
f3 – freiraum für fotografie, Berlin
December 8, 2023 – February 18, 2024
Gallery of Fine Arts, Ostrava
March 5 – May 12, 2024
Following the successful show Ruth Orkin – A Photo Spirit in 2021, f³ – freiraum für fotografie now presents newly discovered and previously unpublished photographs by American photographer Ruth Orkin.
Ruth Orkin was one of the professional women photographers of the 1940s and 1950s. Although she published in numerous newspapers and magazines such as the New York Times, Life, and Look, and her photographs were part of the legendary exhibition The Family of Man at MoMA, her work, which rivals that of the great photographers of her time, is still little known internationally. One of her most important photographs is American Girl in Italy from 1951, which became a symbol of the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The street scene shows a young woman striding through a line of whistling men.
Tracing the photographer's footsteps, Nadine Barth, curator and publicist @barthouseprojects, and Katharina Mouratidi, Artistic Director f³ – freiraum für fotografie, came across a largely unpublished, multi-layered and unique body of work that reveals a little-known side of Ruth Orkin: at of a sensitive, interested, witty, and funny chronicler of American women of the 1940s and 1950s.
With biting humor, the photographer devised reportages such as »Who Works Harder?«, which compares the life of a housewife and mother with that of a career woman, documented women in beauty salons, at cocktail parties, at dog shows and on the film set in Hollywood. In the footage we encounter Lauren Bacall, Jane Russell, Joan Taylor, and Doris Day, but also waitresses, stewardesses, soldiers, and best friends.
What Ruth Orkin’s subtle but radically subversive shots capture are images of women on the move who are beginning to shed the conventions imposed on them and go their own way: self-confident, stylish, smart and ahead of their time.
RUTH ORKIN (1921–1985) began taking photographs at the age of ten. In 1939 she studied photojournalism at Los Angeles City College, the same year she produced her first major photographic work. At the age of 17, she crossed the United States by bicycle and with a camera on her way to the World's Fair, from Los Angeles to New York. As a freelance photographer, she worked for Life, Look and Ladies Home Journal, among other magazines. On the occasion of her 100th birthday in 2021, her work was rediscovered and shown for the first time in a solo exhibition in Germany at f³ – freiraum für fotografie.
The exhibition was curated by Nadine Barth and Katharina Mouratidi
Accompanying the exhibition is the photo book Ruth Orkin – Women published by Hatje Cantz
Edited by: Nadine Barth, Katharina Mouratidi
Published by Hatje Cantz, 2023
Hardcover, 265mm x 265mm, 144 Pages, 111 Ills.
ISBN: 978-3-7757-5685-3
f³ – freiraum für fotografie
Waldemarstraße 17 - 10179 Berlin
