Pioneer Women in Photography, a panel discussion on Creative Insights and Inspiration
Ruth Gruber, now 95 years old, had backstage access to Jewish history. She is accomplished in both life and photography--escorting war refugees from Europe to America; she detailed the plight of the Exodus 1947; she described the establishment of the State of Israel; and she documented the State’s ingathering of refugees from Europe, Iraq, Yemen, and Ethiopia. Emissary for Harold Ickes and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, friend to Eleanor Roosevelt and Golda Meier, Ruth found that her life and work are inextricably bound to the rescue and survival of the Jewish people. The current exhibition at the Museum of Jewish Heritage consists of Gruber’s powerful photographs of her experiences in Displaced Persons camps in New York, Cyprus, and early Israel. Many of the photographs is the exhibition appear in Ruth Gruber’s forthcoming book, Witness, to be published in April 2007 by Schocken Books. www.mjhnyc.org
Rebecca Lepkoff, also in her nineties, has been photographing in New York City since the late 1930’s. She was associated with the Photo League, the legendary New York based group of photographers whose goal was dedicated to using photography to capture everyday life and promote social involvement. This Rebecca did, capturing the ethnic richness of life on the Lower East Side. She continued to shoot the Lower East Side throughout the fifties, seventies and eighties, and she still prints her beautiful photographs today as well as creating ceramic art and wonderful quilts. Rebecca’s work can be seen at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in Soho, in the collections including the National Museum of Art in Washington, DC, the National Gallery of Canada, the Museum of the City of New York, the Bank of America and the Consolidated Freightways, Inc. collection. www.rebeccalepkoff.com
Nancy Rudolph, began photographing in the late 1940’s and her first photographic essay appeared in the New York Times Magazine in the 1950’s. Later on assignment for the John Hay Whitney Foundation’s annual report, she photographed a meeting of the Black Lung Association of Pike County, Kentucky. Shortly after there was a mine disaster in that same area, in which twenty-six miners were killed. Nancy was compelled to return to tell the story of that place through the widows. These images were exhibited at NYU’s Photo Center Gallery and she received an award from Communication Arts magazine. In 1976 she was one of the first women to elected to the Board of ASMP. When Nancy was sixty-five she returned to college and completed a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Anthropology, from the Union Institute and University. In October 2006 she received from them a Doctorate of Humane Letters. In 1999 Nancy continued her photographic adventures, living in the Kerala rainforest and writing about it for the Times of India. She has had seventeen solo exhibits, created three photo books: New Neighborhoods, New Lives for the NYC Housing Authority in 1964; Play and Playgrounds for the National Association for the Education of Young Children in 1970 which won the AIGA Photo award; Workyards, Playgrounds, Planned Adventure published by Teacher’s College Press in 1974; and is she currently writing her illustrated memoir. www.photoarts.com/journal/rudolph/intro.html
Erika Stone, in her eighties, began her active professional career in the 1940’s, and she too was a member of the Photo League. Erika studied photography at the New School of Social Research with Bernice Abbott and George Tice. In 1951 she won a prize in the famous Life Magazine Contest for Young Photographers. Later she became a mother, and made a specialty of photographing children and families, while continuing in her spare time the documentary work. Her images appear in magazines and textbooks used around the world. Erika has had eighteen solo exhibits, four of which were in Germany in 2001; one in New York’s National Arts Club in 2004 and in 2005 at The Icebox Gallery in Minneapolis. She has been mentioned in ten books including four US Camera Annuals in the 1950’s, and was among the twenty women photographers whose work was included in the anthology Women of Vision in 1982. Erika and Rebecca are both mentioned in Naomi Rosenblum’s 1994 “A History of Women Photographers.” Her images are included in prominent photographic collections such as the George Eastman House in Rochester, the Museum of the City of New York, Chicago Fine Arts Museum and the Center of Creative Photography in Tucson. www.erikastone.com