Santander,
This year forty from the death in New York of the photographer Ruth Orkin, whose work has not been too disclosed in Spain, although in 2022 the Kutxa Foundation of San Sebastián gave him an anthology. Now is the Documentation Center of the image of Santander. Cdis who exposes forty works from his archive within the programming of Photospaña in the Cantabrian capital, on a journey commissioned by Anne Morin, also responsible for that other Basque exhibition. Review three decades of its journey, since the end of the thirties (Bicycle Trip It is its earliest series) and even the seventies, a period in which it resided in New York.
Orkin was the daughter of a silent film actress and a miniature ship manufacturer and the golden Hollywood prior to World War II would be the stage of her childhood and first youth (she was born in Boston in 1923). In fact, although he obtained his first camera when he was only ten years old -it was a Univex that cost less than forty cents -his first passion was cinema, the moving image, which led him to work soon at the Goldwyn Mayer Metro, a company in which he gradually occupied several rising positions, gradually training his gaze. It would not be, as we will see, his only film incursion.
They were times of increasing urban stimuli that transformed visual languages, of an incipient creative modernity, and the time of choosing studies chose to train in photojournalism in Los Angeles City College, starting collaborations with publications such as Life, look either Ladies Home Journal Without neglecting his interest in the seventh art: he tried to gestate a language conceived as a crossroads between genres, a conjunction of parallel temporalities at a time when the photo was an essential tool to break down time and capture the invisible.
If we analyze your first images, it is not difficult to glimpse that double background, an effect of duration that looks like a truck of the camera: it often resorted to a process of seriality and intermittency that would not be understood without the presence, more explicitly or less, of the time; Whether through the presentation of very similar but not twin figures, suggesting simultaneity through a false Raccord that would reconstitute a movement in trapTojo (juxtaposition generates movement and, therefore, transience) or the adoption of an air point of view that made the pedestrians particles that were mixed.
This temporality can also be detected in other images of variable interval: its first Road Movie He carried it in 1939, with only seventeen years, crossing the United States by bicycle between Los Angeles and New York to see the World Fair; He made a newspaper that became a single film sequence, a documentary that collects his adventure through a timeliness chronologically deployed. Inspired by the notebooks and albums that his mother kept from the filming in which he participated, and using the same manuscript typologies for the legends, this author placed the photographic image in a narrative sequence that resumed the scheme of the film progression: the time of the story is the same as the duration of the trip and the photographic images correspond to the fixed images of a film that did not exist. The photo is, in this way, in its hands the detonation that indicates a precise point of reality, but contains above all for itself the idea of duration, even in short, and participates in a fluctuation, the look and the narrative.
That fluidity between the pieces, compatible with the interstitium between photos that Deleuze baptized as a spacing that makes each image be starting the vacuum and falling back into it, can be clearly appreciated in the sets of Card players (1952) o Jimmy the storyteller (1947), which we can say that the artist “filmed” with her camera, inducing the notion of fragmentation and with the viewer’s gaze to restore the movement as if useful of a zoopraxinoscope. Children are their unique protagonists and lent themselves as figures within the framework of New York streets that were, for Orkin, theatrical scenarios in which representation never stopped, the spaces where ordinary stories were transformed into real fictions.
It would be at the end of the forties when the artist had established himself as one of the great American firms; He multiplied his collaborations after joining the photo league, worked in Israel and also in Italy: there he carried out American Girl in Italyimage of Ninalee Craig that was part of one of its fundamental series, Don’t Be Afraid to Travel Alonededicated to women who were traveling alone after World War II and made in the format of photonovela, the typology that linked text and photography and that arose precisely in that country, in Italy, in 1947. We can say that this genre, in its invoice, has a lot to do with cinema, and in its formulation with the comic.
Back to America, Orkin, now, went into the cinema directly (along with her husband Morris Engel produced two long, one of them the renowned Little fugitivequite relevant to the Nouvelle Vague), but did not abandon the photograph: one of his last images of images made it from the window of his house, next to Central Park, repeating framed and focusing on the changes produced by the stations in the leaves of the trees, with obvious echoes to the elasticity of the film time. Collected that production in his books A World Through my Window and More Pictures from My Window And it is likely that the intention of these volumes has a legacy character: surely their production is globally articulated around those intervals of those born, much more than appearances, timeless spaces hidden in the shadows.
Ruth Orkin. “New York – New York”
Santander image documentation center. CDIS
C/ Magallanes, 30
Santander
From July 18 to October 18, 2025
