Ruth-Marion Baruch

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Ruth-Marion Baruch (born June 15, 1922 in Berlin , † October 11, 1997 in San Rafael (California) ) was an American photographer and poet who became known for her 1960 photo series The Black Panthers and Haight-Ashbury .

life and work

Ruth-Marion Baruch, born in Berlin, daughter of the neurosurgeon Max Baruch, immigrated to the USA with her parents in 1927. She grew up in New York City and, at the age of 14, wrote and staged her first play at Emanu-El in New York entitled "Middle Ages Returning". In 1944 she received a BA in creative writing and literary criticism and a BA in journalism , both from the University of Missouri . In the summer of 1945 Baruch wrote on her dissertation on Edward Weston : "The Man, the Artist and the Photographer" and worked with him for almost a month at his home in Carmel . It was there that Baruch met Ansel Adams and decided to expand her studies to include photography . At the California School of Fine Arts , Baruch studied together with her future husband Pirkle Jones under the direction of Adams, Minor White , Homer Page (1918–1985) and Weston. She was believed to be the first woman in the United States to receive a Masters of Fine Arts degree in photography from Ohio University in 1946.

In 1961, Baruch was working on two photo essays, in collaboration with her husband Jones. The first was Walnut Grove : Portrait of a City. A documentation of a small, racially diverse community on the Sacramento River Delta . The second essay “Illusion for Sale” were photographs of women shopping in the shops on Union Square (San Francisco) , who were looking for their own identity.

In 1967, during the Summer of Love , Baruch took photos in Haight-Ashbury , when the so-called hippie movement came together with more than 100,000 people.

In 1968 Ruth-Marion Baruch turned to Kathleen Neal Cleaver , the wife of the Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, and spoke of her interest in the Black Panthers and her desire for a balanced representation in the media. Baruch and Jones were given access to the inner circle of the Black Panther Party and from July to October 1968 they took photographs in San Francisco Bay and prepared the photo essay on the Black Panther movement . This contribution was and is a documentary that had far-reaching effects on social, political and cultural life in America. The book "The Vanguard, A Photographic Essay on the Black Panthers" was published in 1970.

In the 1970s and 1980s Ruth-Marion Baruch took photographs, made exhibitions and began to write. Her poetry "A Dangerous Thing" was published in September 2002 by Apollo Presse. Baruchs' work was steeped in social awareness and her sense of moral obligation is very evident in her remarkable images of people, places and things.

Her work is in institutions such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art , the International Museum of Photography George Eastman House, Rochester, the Center for Creative Photography , Tucson, The Art Institute of Chicago , the Polaroid Corporation , (Cambridge, MA ) and at the Oakland Museum .

Exhibitions (selection)

literature

  • Ruth-Marion Baruch, Pirkle Jones: The Vanguard. A Photographic Essay on the Black Panthers. Beacon Press, 1970, ISBN 0-8070-0552-5 .
  • Kathleen Neal Cleaver, Ruth-Marion Baruch: Black Panthers 1968. Greybull Press, 2002, ISBN 0-9672366-9-X .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ruth-Marion Baruch, pictures for “Illusion for Sale”, women shopping or the search for their own identity
  2. ↑ Haight-Ashbury, the hippie district
  3. ^ The Vanguard: A Photographic Essay on the Black Panthers. 1970 (pdf)
personal data
SURNAME Baruch, Ruth-Marion
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American photographer
DATE OF BIRTH June 15, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH October 11, 1997
Place of death San Rafael (California)