Ruth BernhardFemale Nudes: Sculpting with Light

A nude woman laying in a horizontal box in a monochromatic background that centers the woman
Ruth Bernhard, In the Box, Horizontal, 1962 (printed 1992). Gelatin silver print on paper, 18 x 24 inches. San José Museum of Art. Gift from the Estate of Ruth Bernhard, 2007.25. Photo by Douglas Sandberg.

Like classical sculpture, Ruth Bernhard’s nude photography attempts a kind of universal statement. Emphasizing shape and line through composition and light, it was a meditation on the beauty and strength of the human body. The first nude photograph Bernhard took was a spontaneous work; the Museum of Modern Art hired her to photograph objects in the 1934 Machine Art exhibition for the catalog. The artist’s friend Peggy Boone was visiting one day when Bernhard was shooting a large stainless-steel bowl and summoned Boone to climb inside it. Framed in its cold steel rim, Boone’s curled-up naked body resembles an embryo.1 But Bernhard’s main body of work on the nude developed some twenty years later in San Francisco during the 1950s and 60s. In the Box, Horizontal (1962), considered a masterpiece in the history of twentieth-century photography, expands on her earlier Embryo (1934). Accentuating bone structure and muscle, Bernhard was a pioneer in presenting a distinctly feminine study of the female form: “Men have photographed the female nude as if she belonged to them. I photograph a woman as part of the universe.”2

  1. Ruth Bernhard, “Coming of Age,” in Ruth Bernhard: Between Art & Life, ed. Margaretta K. Mitchell (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2000), 61. ↩︎

  2. Ilee Kaplan, “The Female Form,” in Ruth Bernhard: Known and Unknown, ed. Constance Glenn (Long Beach: University Art Museum, California State University, 1996), n.p. ↩︎