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Ruth Orkin was an award-winning photojournalist and filmmaker. 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 ten, she received her first camera, a 39-cent Univex, and she began by photographing her friends and teachers at school. She bought her first serious camera, a Pilot 6 Single-Lens Reflex medium-format device, in 1937, for 16 dollars.

At age 17 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.

In 1943, Orkin moved to New York, 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 the 1940s, and also went to Tanglewood during the summers to shoot musicians at the rehearsals, among them such greats of the time as Leonard Bernstein and Isaac Stern.

In 1951, Life magazine sent her to Israel to follow the Israeli Philharmonic on their tour. Orkin then went to Italy, and it was in Florence that she met Ninalee 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, which gave a sense of what they encountered as women traveling alone in Europe after the war.

On her return to New York, Orkin married photographer and filmmaker Morris Engel, with whom she would make two feature films. One of them, the now classic Little Fugitive was nominated for an Academy Award in 1953, and won a Silver Lion at that year’s Venice Film Festival. Their New York apartment overlooked Central Park, and Orkin would photograph marathons from the window, as well as 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, on January 16, 1985, Orkin passed away in her apartment, surrounded by her wonderful legacy of photographs with the view of Central Park outside her window.

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