Bassano del Grappa hosts the first retrospective in Italy on Ruth Orkin

From December 18, 2021 to May 2, 2022, the Civic Gallery of Bassano del Grappa will host the first retrospective in Italy dedicated to photographer, photojournalist and filmmaker Ruth Orkin (Boston, 1921 - New York, 1985). Ruth Orkin. Legend of Photography, this is the title of the exhibition, is produced in collaboration with diChroma Photography and aims to celebrate the artistic activity of this pioneer of photojournalism on the centenary of her birth. After Bassano del Grappa, the only Italian stop, the anthological exhibition will begin a European tour and is expected in San Sebastian, Spain, and Cascais, Portugal.

On display will be more than one hundred and ten of the most famous photographs of his career: from VE-Day to Jimmy tells a story, from American Girl in Italy to portraits of Robert Capa, Marlon Brando and Woody Allen. Whether single shots or works composed of sequences of frames, portraits or cityscapes, each of Ruth Orkin’s photographs has the force of a narrative in which places and people are mutually mirrored. In both single shots and works composed of sequences of frames, Orkin brings true storytelling to life. Famous are her images shot perpendicularly from the window of her apartment on Central Park and, above all, the series of American Girl in Italy: Nina Lee Craig, an American student of art history whom the photographer had met on her return from a reportage in Israel, becomes the protagonist of a series of photographs taken on the streets of Florence that recounts the experience of a young American woman traveling in postwar Italy.

Orkin was not only a photographer and photojournalist, but also a filmmaker: together with her husband Morris Engel she made the independent feature film The Little Fugitive, which won the Silver Lion at the 1953 Venice Film Festival.

“I am very pleased to present the work of this leading figure in twentieth-century photography,” said Bassano Civic Museums director Barbara Guidi. “Her ability to fuse together, in a perfect and mysterious alchemy, the engaging power of storytelling and the freshness of the moment captured on the fly makes her one of the most fascinating artists of the last century.”

A child of the arts (her mother was a silent film performer), Ruth grew up in the Hollywood of the second and third decades of the twentieth century. At age ten she got her first camera. Adventurous while still very young, she set off on a bicycle from Los Angeles to New York to visit the 1939 Expo, where she immortalized in evocative images the places and people she encountered on this lonely journey.

After dreaming of becoming a director for MGM, a profession then barred to women, Orkin moved to New York in 1943 and worked as a nightclub photographer. In the 1940s she shot for major magazines of the time such as LIFE, Look, Laydies Home Journal and became a leading photographer. She documents the Tanglewood Music Festival. In 1947 she published the Jimmy the Storyteller sequence of shots for Look magazine. Passionate about music and film, she immortalized their protagonists in vivid and intense portraits, but also turned her attention to other figures on the international scene.

In 1951 LIFE commissioned her to make a reportage in Israel. The subsequent visit to Florence gave rise to the aforementioned American Girl in Italy. Then membership in the Photo League in 1952, marriage to Engel and the making of several feature films such as Little Fugitive nominated for an Oscar for best screenplay. A successful career in which, alongside work for the New York Times and other publications, Orkin continued his personal journey into the everyday by creating highly original projects such as A World Outside My Window, published in 1978.

For info: museibassano.it

Hours: Daily from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Closed Tuesdays.

Image: Ruth Orkin, American Girl in Italy, Florence, 1951 © Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

Bassano del Grappa hosts the first retrospective in Italy on Ruth Orkin

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