Hailed by Ansel Adams as “the greatest photographer of the nude,” Ruth Bernhard is known for her sensual yet reserved nudes, still lifes, and photographs of natural forms. After studying art history and typography at the Berlin Academy of Art, in 1927 Bernhard moved to New York where she worked as a photographer’s assistant for a magazine. But it wasn’t until she met Edward Weston in California in 1935, that she began to seriously pursue a career in photography. In the 1940s, she became part of the Group f/64, joining Modernist West Coast photographers Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Minor White, Imogen Cunningham, and Dorothea Lange, and by the time she moved to San Francisco in the 1950s, Ruth Bernhard was already an established commercial photographer. From 1968—76 she taught creative photography at the University of California, San Francisco, and continued lecturing and leading workshops through the United States until her 95th birthday. In 1975 she was given the Dorothea Lange Award by the Oakland Art Museum, and granted a Certificate of Honor by the city of San Francisco in 1978. Her photographs are housed in important collections world-wide, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.