Ruth-Marion Baruch


Ruth-Marion Baruch, was a German-born American photographer, remembered for her pictures of the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s.

Early life and education

Baruch was born into a Jewish family in Berlin on June 15, 1922. She and her family migrated in 1927 to the United States. She was raised in New York City, her father Max Baruch was a neurosurgeon.
She received a BA degree in 1944 in English and journalism from the University of Missouri. She studied photography at Ohio University, and received an MFA degree in 1946; and she attended classes from 1946 to 1949 at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, in the first class of students taught by Ansel Adams, Minor White, Dorothea Lange, Homer Page, and Edward Weston after World War II.

Photography

Baruch's works, in collaboration with photographer and husband Pirkle Jones, including Illusion For Sale, and a series on the Black Panther Party taken from July to October 1968, and a series on the hippies of Haight-Ashbury.
Baruch's photographs were exhibited in Perceptions at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1954, as well as Edward Steichen's New York Museum of Modern Art exhibition, The Family of Man in 1955.
Donated by the Marin Community Foundation, The Pirkle Jones and Ruth-Marion Baruch Collection, an archive of photographs documenting the people, landscape, and politics of California in the mid-20th century, is the largest single gift in history, to U.C. Santa Cruz, with an estimated value of $32 million.

Exhibitions