Ruth Gruber: Photojournalist
This exhibition celebrates the remarkable life and heroic tenacity of Ruth Gruber, a twentieth鈥揷entury pioneer and trailblazing photojournalist. Born to Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn, Gruber became the youngest PhD in the world, at age twenty, with a dissertation on Virginia Woolf. In 1935, she became the first correspondent to travel to the Siberian Gulag and Soviet Arctic. Although she is known primarily as an author and journalist, photography was a component of her earliest reportage; her groundbreaking work as a photojournalist now spans more than five decades on four continents.
Acclaimed as an author and intrepid correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, Gruber was appointed by U.S. Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes in 1941 to report on conditions in the Alaska Territory. She captured some of the earliest color images of Alaska鈥檚 vast frontier, the lives and customs of the native population, and the conditions and experiences of American soldiers. In 1944, during World War II, Gruber stewarded the ship Henry Gibbins on a secret U.S. government mission that brought nearly 1,000 Jewish refugees from Europe to Fort Ontario, in upstate New York. This was the only attempt by the United States to shelter Jewish refugees during the war. Gruber subsequently shifted her attention to the lives of refugees and to issues of rescue, sanctuary, and liberation, devoting her life to humanitarian causes.
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This exhibition celebrates the remarkable life and heroic tenacity of Ruth Gruber, a twentieth鈥揷entury pioneer and trailblazing photojournalist. Born to Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn, Gruber became the youngest PhD in the world, at age twenty, with a dissertation on Virginia Woolf. In 1935, she became the first correspondent to travel to the Siberian Gulag and Soviet Arctic. Although she is known primarily as an author and journalist, photography was a component of her earliest reportage; her groundbreaking work as a photojournalist now spans more than five decades on four continents.
Acclaimed as an author and intrepid correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, Gruber was appointed by U.S. Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes in 1941 to report on conditions in the Alaska Territory. She captured some of the earliest color images of Alaska鈥檚 vast frontier, the lives and customs of the native population, and the conditions and experiences of American soldiers. In 1944, during World War II, Gruber stewarded the ship Henry Gibbins on a secret U.S. government mission that brought nearly 1,000 Jewish refugees from Europe to Fort Ontario, in upstate New York. This was the only attempt by the United States to shelter Jewish refugees during the war. Gruber subsequently shifted her attention to the lives of refugees and to issues of rescue, sanctuary, and liberation, devoting her life to humanitarian causes.
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