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Sometimes an artist's life is worthy of as much consideration as her work. This is especially true of Ruth Gruber, the photojournalist who received the lifetime achievement award from the International Center of Photography and whose ICP-curated retrospective is being shown at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education.
Gruber's biography reads like an outline for a Hollywood biopic of a 20th-century world-beater: in 1931, when it was rare for women to even attend college, Gruber became the youngest person in the world to earn a Ph.D. In '44, she was made special envoy on a top-secret mission to bring 1,000 holocaust survivors from Europe to the U.S. for asylum. During that trip, her purpose crystallized. "Listening to their stories of survival, I had an epiphany," she remembers. "I realized that for the rest of my life I would use my tools—my words and images—to fight injustice." After that, she often put herself in dangerous situations, like having herself smuggled into internment camps, in order to document the atrocities of war. She went where few, if any, reporters were allowed; in some cases, her images were the world's only way to witness events it could only read about in newspapers.
Walking through the gallery, you will notice that Gruber's untitled black-and-white images tell the biggest stories by capturing the tiniest moments. In one photo, duffle bags molder in a monumental pile on a dock in Haifa, thrown off the side of a boat when their refugee owners were disallowed entry and forced onto British prison ships without their belongings. In another, a young girl who has just disembarked after a long trip to what she thinks is her new home, looks straight into Gruber's lens, unaware that she and her family are about to be sprayed with DDT and sent back to a displaced-persons camp. Gruber, who turns 105 in September, also gives us glimpses of hope, with images of refugees reuniting with their relatives after being separated by years of war.
I cannot claim objectivity with this review, because in the photos are the faces of my people. And when I saw them, I wept openly in the gallery, unable to hold back tears. For some of you, the retrospective will feel similarly personal; for others, simply historic. And for all of us, in light of the current refugee crisis, Gruber's images will be a sharp reminder that we don't always learn from our mistakes.
SEE IT: Ruth Gruber, Photojournalist is at Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education, 1953 NW Kearney St., 226-3600. Through June 13.
Willamette Week