Ruth Bernhard

Ruth Bernhard (1905–2006) was a German‑American photographer whose rigorously composed, high‑contrast studies of the female form and still life elevated 20th‑century fine‑art photography. Born in Berlin, she trained at the Academy of Fine Arts before moving to New York in 1927. By the early 1930s she was producing intimate nude studies and working commercially to support herself, but her encounter with Edward Weston on a Santa Monica beach in 1935 proved transformative—he became her mentor and inspired her pursuit of photographic purity.

In the 1940s Bernhard joined Group f/64 alongside Weston, Ansel Adams, Minor White, Imogen Cunningham, and Dorothea Lange. Like her peers, she embraced a “purist” aesthetic—meticulous compositions, sharp focus, and dramatic lighting. Working almost exclusively in the studio, she often invested days perfecting a single shot from one precise angle. “If I have chosen the female form,” she explained, “it is because beauty has been debased and exploited in our sensual 20th century. To raise, to elevate… the image of woman has been my mission.”

Bernhard published several monographs—Women and the Camera and Forms in Nature among them—and her images reside in major collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Through her unwavering discipline and timeless reverence for shape and form, Ruth Bernhard left a lasting legacy as one of the great masters of photographic art.