I have always loved this photograph by Ruth Orkin of an American Girl in Italy, 1951:
But in the 1960s when Ruth Orkin started having children, she stopped travelling and was often confined to her apartment in NYC. So she began to photograph from her window whenever she could slip away for a moment. On the rare occasions she made it to a public event, she would introduce herself as “housewife, scenic photographer.” Heading into my seventh week of apartment confinement, I have no idea anymore how I would introduce myself–“housewife, Zoom slave” perhaps?
Read more about Ruth Orkin and her work in this wonderful little article by Sam Kashner in Air Mail. As Kashner writes, “We’re all Ruth Orkin now.”
