Turin, Italy's largest anthology on Ruth Orkin at the Royal Museums, with 156 photos

From March 17 to July 16, 2023, the Sale Chiablese of the Royal Museums of Turin will host the largest anthological exhibition ever organized in Italy of Ruth Orkin (Boston, 1921 - New York, 1985), an American photojournalist, photographer and filmmaker who was among the most relevant of the 20th century. Ruth Orkin. A New Discovery, the exhibition curated by Anne Morin traces the work of one of the most important personalities in 20th-century photography.

With 156 photographs, most of them originals, the exhibition organized by diChroma, produced by Società Ares srl with the Musei Reali and the patronage of the City of Turin, traces the trajectory of the American photojournalist, particularly between 1939 and the late 1960s, through some capital works such as VE-Day, Jimmy Tells a Story, American Girl in Italy, one of her most iconic in the history of photography, portraits of such personalities as Robert Capa, Albert Einstein, Marlon Brando, Orson Welles, Lauren Bacall, Vittorio De Sica, Woody Allen and others.

The exhibition approaches her work from a completely new perspective, at the intersection of the still and moving image. Fascinated by film, Ruth Orkin indeed dreamed of becoming a filmmaker, thanks in part to the influence of her mother, Mary Ruby, a silent film actress, who brought her into the wings of 1920s and 1930s Hollywood. In the first half of the last century, however, the road to this career for a woman was strewn with obstacles. Ruth Orkin thus had to give up her dream of becoming a filmmaker, or at least had to reinvent and transform it; abetted by the gift of her first camera, a 39-cent Univex, she took up photography but never neglected the fascination of filmmaking. It was precisely the missed appointment with her vocation that forced her to invent a language at the confluence of these two sister arts, between the still image and the illusion of the moving image, a language that induced a constant correspondence between two non-parallel temporalities.

Through a very specific analysis of Orkin’s work, the review allows us to understand the mechanisms put in place to evoke the ghost of cinema in his work. As is the case in his first Road Movie in 1939, when he cycled across the United States from Los Angeles to New York. On that occasion, Ruth Orkin kept a diary that became a film sequence, a reportage chronicling this journey and whose temporal linearity unfolds in chronological order. Inspired by the notebooks and scrapbooks in which her mother documented the shooting of her films, and using the same kind of handwritten captions, the artist inserted the photographic image into a narrative that echoed the pattern of cinematic progression, as if the photographs were still images of a film that was never shot and of which 22 pages are displayed.

The exhibition also features works such as The Card Players or Jimmy Tells a Story, from 1947, in which Ruth Orkin uses the camera to film, or rather, to fix moments, leaving it up to the viewer’s gaze to compose the scene and reproduce the movement, but also images and the film Little fugitive (1953), nominated for an Academy Award for Best Motion Picture Story and winner of the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, which tells the story of a seven-year-old boy named Joey (Richie Andrusco) who escapes to Coney Island after being tricked into believing he has killed his older brother Lennie and which François Truffaut considered of fundamental importance to the birth of the New Wave. In the early 1940s, Ruth Orkin moved to New York City, where she became a member of the Photo League, a cooperative of New York photographers, and established prestigious collaborations with major magazines, so much so that she became one of the female signatures of the moment. It was during this period that she produced some of the most interesting shots of her career. With From Above Orkin captures perpendicularly from a window the events taking place on the street, capturing some people completely unaware that they are the object of her photographic gaze: a group of ladies feeding street cats; a father who, having bought a slice of watermelon, hands it to his daughter in front of the street vendor’s stall; two policemen cordoning off a worn-out mattress abandoned on the street; two little girls playing at twirling each other around; a group of sailors who are walking briskly and become recognizable by their hats that stand out like white discs against the gray asphalt backdrop.

Many years later, he returned to this kind of shooting: from a window overlooking Central Park, the artist replayed the same gesture and the same shot, in the different seasons, recording the physiognomy of the trees, the hue of their leaves: the subject is precisely time and its passing, in the form of a sequence that speaks of the elasticity of filmic time.

The exhibition will then give an account of the reportage for LIFE magazine, made in 1951 in Israel following the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra, and of the trip he made to Italy, visiting Venice, Rome and Florence, the city where he met Nina Lee Craig, an American student, whom he asked to model for a shoot aimed at narrating in images the experience of a woman traveling alone in a foreign country and who became the subject of American Girl in Italy, one of his most iconic and most famous in the history of photography; the scene that captures Nina Lee Craig strolling through the streets of Florence among a group of men who blink as she passes, succeeds in inspiring Ruth Orkin with the photo-narrative she had long sought.

A Skira catalog accompanies the exhibition.

Information: Tel. 338 169 1652 Email: info@mostraruthorkin.it Site: www.mostraruthorkin.it

Statements

“As a curator and historian of photography,” says Anne Morin, “it has always seemed to me that Ruth Orkin’s work has not received the recognition it deserves. Yet if this photographer has a fascinating destiny, her work is equally so. This exhibition sets out to revisit the work of the woman who wanted to be a filmmaker and who, because of circumstances being a male-dominated film world, had to find her place elsewhere. She did not give up her dream, but approached it differently, creating a singular, extremely rich and new language through photography. Ruth Orkin’s photographic work is about images, film, stories and, ultimately, life. This exhibition is the definitive affirmation of the work of this young woman who has reinvented another kind of photography.”

“After the great success of Vivian Maier,” says Edoardo Accattino, Administrator Ares srl, “we bring to Turin a new exhibition, dedicated to Ruth Orkin, an elegant and sophisticated photographer. The most extensive anthology ever made on one of the most important signatures of the 20th century, whose work is still little known today. Therefore, we wanted to create an engaging path that will take visitors to discover and learn about a sensitive artist whose extraordinary work will fascinate the Turin audience.”

“The monographic exhibition on Ruth Orkin,” says Enrica Pagella, Director of the Royal Museums, “continues the series of exhibitions dedicated to photography as the identifying feature of the Sale Chiablese, a space that the Royal Museums reserve especially for contemporary arts and reflection on the media that have contributed to changing the face of history and society. After Vivian Maier. Unseen and Focus on Future. 14 Photographers for the UN 2030 Agenda, this anthological exhibition returns a careful reflection on the different languages that have led the artist to accredit and distinguish herself in the panorama of world photography, attesting to the primacy and visionary nature of a gaze that has yet to be explored, faithful to the narrative of a time when the affirmation of gender was a distant achievement, even in the artistic sphere.”

Turin, Italy's largest anthology on Ruth Orkin at the Royal Museums, with 156 photos

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