Classic portraits, New York scenes and more from the brilliant and indefatigable American photographer. Co-edited by Mary Engel. Released September, 2021.
A Wall Street Journal 2021 holiday gift guide pick
Published on the occasion of what would have been the photographer’s 100th birthday, this illustrated volume celebrates Orkin’s life and career with an equally extensive and fascinating overview of this exceptional artist’s oeuvre.
Mary Engel’s Introduction for Ruth Orkin: A Photo Spirit – revised 5/21/21
When I was a little girl, my mother Ruth was larger than life. She told me to call her Ruth at a young age, so she could hear me in a crowd. She had a great personality, with lots of charisma, and people always said she had chutzpah. She was warm, but she could be tough and strong too. In my eyes, she had it all. My memory is that we had a wonderful and loving relationship for most of my childhood, until things got complicated when I was 12, and she told me she was ill. Once she revealed her cancer diagnosis, our relationship shifted a bit, as I became a part-time caretaker at a young age. She had multiple surgeries, but also much success during this time, including exhibitions and several books. My teenage years meant living with her serious illness on a day-to-day basis, which wasn’t easy.
I have fond memories of playing the piano together and listening to classical music, Barbara Streisand, Cat Stevens, and singing to the scores of My Fair Lady and West Side Story. We loved Alan Sherman’s “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah,” which always made us hysterical with laughter. We went shopping at Macy’s, Gimbels, and used to wear matching printed Indian cotton tops. Each spring, we went to the Easter Parade on Fifth Avenue, and we spent a lot of time together in Central Park, walking everywhere and sometimes renting a rowboat, one of my favorite things to do. Thanksgiving was full of memories because the parade went right by our building. We would watch the balloons pass by, and then people would come upstairs afterwards for brunch—we always had a full house. Thanksgiving was one of my favorite memories because of the excitement throughout the day, and it culminated with Thanksgiving dinner. My mother was not a typical homemaker, but turkey dinner was one of her specialties. She threw me great birthday parties every year and kept records of everything. She tried hard to make my life fulfilled, to make sure I went to the right schools, and she always tried to get us out of the city for the summer. She loved the summers we spent in a rented house on Fire Island, but we couldn’t do this every year.
We weren’t a religious family, but she thought of us as culturally Jewish. She put Jewish stars made of pipe cleaners on our fake white Christmas tree. Given her own fascination with movies since early childhood, she made sure I knew all the Jewish directors in Hollywood. She would circle all the movies I should see from the schedules published by local revival theaters like the Cinema Studio and the Regency. The biggest annual occasion in our household was the Academy Awards and, since she was an Academy member, we always went to screenings around voting time and made the selections together on her official ballot.
I’m ashamed of—ok maybe just a few—which I’ve ripped up. She assembled all these pictures in large scrapbooks that became a wonderful record of my childhood, and I’ve done the same for my son. She loved scrapbooks, especially her proudest endeavor, a photo autobiography she called, ‘Life with a Camera’.
In 1981, when Rizzoli published A Photo Journal, she had her own booth at the Fifth Avenue Book Fair and was in her element meeting all her fans. This book you are holding is her first major publication in 40 years—she would have loved it!
It is still hard to imagine that 36 years after her passing I’ve made a career from handling her work. My last full-time job was as an agent trainee at the William Morris Agency. During that time, I happened to make a film about my mom for her 1995 retrospective at the International Center of Photography. “Ruth Orkin: Frames of Life” was accepted into Sundance that year, so I was very honored. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences selected my film as an outstanding documentary of 1996.
After Sundance, I realized that I could either continue down the agent trainee path, (one of the board members told me to hang in) or I could try to start my own business. I was a bit older than other trainees, and since I wanted to have a child soon the idea of working 24/7 for all the clients the agency represented didn’t make sense. I decided that handling my parents’ work would allow me to make my own rules and live the life I wanted, especially after my son was born in 2000. It was a risk, and it has been an uneven path, despite the work’s popularity.
Handling my mother’s archive over the years has given me a way to remain close to her while marketing and promoting her work, which is always easier for someone else than it is for the artist. I spend a lot of time keeping her work out there, by cultivating new aspects of the archive for future generations to enjoy, both through her website and on social media. There is definitely an art to keeping everything going, and I do my best. To that end, I am especially proud of the American Photography Archives Group (APAG), a non-profit organization I founded in 2000 as a resource for individuals who own or manage privately held photography archives. We started with five people and now have more than 200 members. There is a lot of cross over between running my parents’ archives and APAG, and both of them combined keep me very busy!
2021 is Ruth’s centennial year, and despite the challenges of a pandemic, I am pleased that many of the things I’ve had in the works have come to fruition. I’m thrilled to finally have this book, a major exhibition at Fotografiska in New York, and other shows in the U.S. and abroad.
I hope you enjoy the photographs featured in this collection—a mix of Ruth’s classic photographs, and some unseen gems.