Ruth-Marion Baruch

Photographer and poet Ruth-Marion Baruch was born in 1922 in Berlin, Germany. She is believed to have been the first woman in the US to receive a Masters of Fine Arts in Photography, from Ohio University in 1946. She attended the first class at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, devoted to photography, where she studied with Ansel Adams, Minor White, Homer Page and Edward Weston and also met her future husband, the photographer Pirkle Jones. Baruch’s photography has been exhibited around the US including The Museum of Modern Art (New York), The Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The Amon Carter Museum (Texas) and is represented in major institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, (Rochester), the Center for Creative Photography (Tucson), The Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago), Polaroid Corporation, (Cambridge, MA) and the Oakland Museum (Oakland, CA). A book of her photographs, Black Panthers 1968, in collaboration with Pirkle Jones and with an essay by Kathleen Cleaver, was published by Greybull Press in 2002.