Ruth Orkin (1921 – 1985)

Ruth Orkin was an award-winning photojournalist and filmmaker. Orkin was the only child of Mary Ruby, a silent-film actress, and Samuel Orkin, a manufacturer of toy boats called Orkin Craft. She grew up in Hollywood in the heyday of the 1920s and 1930s. At the age of 10, she received her first camera, a 39 cent Univex. She began by photographing her friends and teachers at school. At 17 years old she took a monumental bicycle trip across the United States from Los Angeles to New York City to see the 1939 World’s Fair, and she photographed along the way.

Orkin moved to New York in 1943, where she worked as a nightclub photographer and shot baby pictures by day to buy her first professional camera. She worked for all the major magazines in 1940s, and also went to Tanglewood during the summers to shoot rehearsals. She ended up with many of the worlds’ greatest musicians of the time including Leonard Bernstein, Isaac Stern, Aaron Copland, Jascha Heifitz, Serge Koussevitzky and many others.

In 1951, LIFE magazine sent her to Israel with the Israeli Philharmonic. Orkin then went to Italy, and it was in Florence where she met Nina Lee Craig, an art student and fellow American, who became the subject of “American Girl in Italy.” The photograph was part of a series originally titled “Don’t Be Afraid to Travel Alone” about what they encountered as women traveling alone in Europe after the war.

On her return to New York, Orkin married the photographer and filmmaker Morris Engel. Together they produced two feature films, including the classic “Little Fugitive” which was nominated for an Academy Award in 1953. From their New York apartment overlooking Central Park, Orkin photographed marathons, parades, concerts, demonstrations, and the beauty of the changing seasons. These photographs were the subject of two widely acclaimed books, “A World Through My Window” and “More Pictures From My Window.” After a long struggle with cancer, Orkin passed away in her apartment, surrounded by her wonderful legacy of photographs with the view of Central Park outside her window.

Morris Engel
1918 – 2005
Home page: http://www.engelphoto.com
Archive contact: Mary Engel – orkinphoto@aol.com

Morris Engel (American, b. April 8, 1918 – d. March 5, 2005) was born in Brooklyn to immigrant parents from Lithuania. An early interest in photography led him to enroll in a class at New York’s Photo League, a group dedicated to raising social consciousness through modern photography. Some of the most influential photographers of the time were associated with the Photo League; Engel worked closely with Aaron Siskind on the project “Harlem Document” from 1936-40 and later assisted Paul Strand in filming Native Land.

Like many Photo League photographers, Engel documented life in New York City, producing and exhibiting photo essays on Coney Island, the Lower East Side and Harlem. In 1939 he had his first exhibition at New York’s New School. In 1940 he joined the staff of the newspaper PM, but he left the publication one year later to sign on with the U.S. Navy as a member of a combat photo unit. He participated in the D-Day invasion of Normandy.

In 1951 Engel momentarily quit still photography to pursue a career in filmmaking. He made a series of low budget films with a custom 35 mm camera. His first feature film, Little Fugitive (made with his wife, the renowned photographer Ruth Orkin), earned an Academy Award nomination in 1953 for Best Original Screenplay and was screened in more than 5,000 theaters across the United States.

Engel’s photographs are widely exhibited and found in the collections of the International Center of Photography (New York), the Museum of the City of New York, the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and the National Portrait Gallery (Washington, D.C.). His films continue to be screened at venues such as the Whitney Museum of Art (New York), the Brooklyn Museum and the American Museum of the Moving Image (New York).

Esther Bubley
1921 – 1998
Home page: http://www.estherbubley.com
Archive contact: Jean Bubley (jbb@kovitzsystems.net)

Esther Bubley (American, b. February 16, 1921 – d. March 16, 1998) was born in Phillips, Wisconsin to Jewish immigrant parents from Eastern Europe. Influenced by the new picture magazine LIFE and the Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographs of depression-era America, Bubley set her sights on a career in photography while she was still in high school. After a two-year diversion to teacher’s college, Bubley took a job in a photo lab. With her earnings and a scholarship, she attended the one-year photography program at the Minneapolis College of Art, and at age 20 moved to Washington, DC to make her mark as a photographer.

Bubley had difficulty finding work in the capital and moved to New York City where she had a series of short-lived jobs and continued to study photography. In December 1941, when the U.S. entered WWII, the job market suddenly opened up for women. Bubley was summoned to the National Archives to microfilm rare books, and she returned to Washington. There she was introduced to Roy Stryker, whose FSA photographic section had recently been transferred to the Office of War Information (OWI). Stryker hired Bubley to work in the lab, but soon promoted her to photographer.

When Stryker left to establish a photographic archive for the Standard Oil Company (New Jersey), Bubley and several other FSA/OWI photographers followed him. Bubley freelanced for Standard Oil for the next twenty years. At the same time, she freelanced for LIFE magazine, Ladies’ Home Journal, the Children’s Bureau, the Pittsburgh Photographic Library, UNICEF, Pepsi-Cola International, and Pan American World Airways, among others. Her work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She won two top place awards in competitions sponsored jointly by the University of Missouri School of Journalism and the Encyclopedia Britannica, several awards from the Art Director’s Club, and in 1954 was the first woman to win a first place award in Photography Magazine’s International division.

Bubley’s work is still widely exhibited, and it is found in the permanent collections of the Library of Congress, the Standard Oil Collection at the University of Louisville, the Pittsburgh Photographic Library Collection at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, the National Portrait Gallery, the International Center of Photography, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego.