"Embryo"

gelatin silver print

photographer's estate stamp on verso

In 1927, Ruth Bernhard, who was born in Germany and was only 22 years old at the time, came to New York to join her father, who had emigrated there a few years earlier. She found a job as a darkroom assistant in the studio of the renowned photographer and filmmaker Ralph Steiner. Although she stayed there for barely a year, this experience inspired her to buy her first camera, an 8x10-inch large-format camera. The purchase coincided with her move to Greenwich Village in Manhattan. Bernhard became deeply involved in the lesbian subculture of the artistic community. The widespread social oppression of homosexuals in the U.S. was omnipresent at that time and would persist for nearly her entire life.¹
It was more of a coincidence in the spring of 1934 that led to Ruth Bernhard’s first nude study. She was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) to photograph objects for the accompanying catalog of the Machine Art exhibition – the museum’s first official exhibition catalog.² She photographed a huge steel bowl. "I guess they were for hotels, maybe for hotel kitchens or something like that […] So I had a friend who was a dancer and when I photographed those bowls she appeared on the horizon and I said, 'Why don't you get in it?' So it as all very unexpected and lots of fun."³
In the catalog itself, only the empty bowl was depicted. Bernhard titled her artistic nude study Embryo. The model’s pale figure crouches in the bowl against a shadowy background; like many of Bernhard’s compositions, the image can be interpreted on multiple levels: literally as a figure in a bowl, or as a reference to the emergence of Bernhard’s new artistic direction. "It's a very simple picture, apparently just a moment in time. But it's carefully posed. Everything exactly in its place."⁴
(Christoph Fuchs)

Notes

1
see Josh Bright, "Ruth Bernhard", The Indipendent Photographer, 2025, https://independent-photo.com/de/News/Ruth-Bernhard/ (accessed 16.10.2026)

2
Museum of Modern Art, Machine Art, exh.cat., New York 1934,  https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1784_300061872.pdf (accessed 16.10.2026)

3
Euan Kerr, Ruth Bernhard. Life gave me presents, radio interview, Minnesota Public Radio,
Sep 3, 2002, https://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/200209/02_kerre_bernhard/ (accessed 16.10.2026)

4
ibd.