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ID Photo: Larry Colwell.
Ruth Bernhard (Oct. 14, 1905-Dec. 18, 2006); German-born American photographer.
....Most of her work is studio-based, ranging from simple still lifes to complex nudes.... She worked almost exclusively in black-and-white.... She also is known for her lesbian themed works, most notably Two Forms (1962). In that work, a black woman and a white woman who were real-life lovers are featured with their nude bodies pressed against one another.
...In the early 1980s, Bernhard started to work with Carol Williams, owner of Photography West Gallery in Carmel, California. Bernhard told Williams that she knew there would be a book of her photography after her death, but hoped one could be published during her lifetime.
In 1967, Bernhard met US Air Force Colonel Price Rice, an African American man 10 years younger than her, and the two became lovers.They would remain together until his death in 1999. In her 90s, Bernhard cooperated with biographer Margaretta K. Mitchell in the book Ruth Bernhard, Between Art and Life, publicly revealing her many affairs with women and men throughout her lifetime.
.... hailed by Ansel Adams as "the greatest photographer of the nude".
Died in San Francisco at 101. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Bernhard)
Ruth Bernhard is best known for her perfectly composed, sensual female nudes... In her introduction to The Eternal Body. A Collection of Fifty Nudes, she writes: "In photographing nudes, it is my aim to transform the complexities of the figure into harmonies of simplified form....I have approached my work with the nude much as I create a still life -- with patience and reverence. My quest through magic of light and shadow is to isolate, simplify and to give emphasis to form with the greatest clarity." http://www.photoeye.com/auctions/Auction.cfm?id=7134 undefined