UPPER WEST SIDE — Humanitarian, Ruth Gruber, perhaps best known for leading a secret mission to bring Holocaust survivors to the U.S. during World War II has been recast as a groundbreaking photojournalist in a new exhibit at JCC Manhattan.
Dozens of Gruber's photographs, spanning 50 years of her work and four continents, were collected by International Center of Photography curator Maya Benton for a 2011 ICP exhibit that has now traveled to the JCC's Laurie M. Tisch Gallery.
"[The exhibit] is the first time there’s been a retrospective of her [photography]," said Benton, who describes Gruber as one of the past century's greatest photographers.
Gruber, who chronicled life for Ethiopian refugees, Inuit families and Jews interned in Cyprus, among many other groups, "was a humanitarian above all else," the curator explained.
"She was using her photos to draw attention to the plight of human suffering" as a journalist and at times as an envoy of the U.S. government, she said.
Benton dug through the drawers of the longtime Upper West Side, now 103 years old , to find her negatives and prints before having the ICP carefully reprint them.
What makes the photographs remarkable is not just the historic moments they capture and the wrongdoing they helped expose, but Gruber's technique, the curator noted.
Her use of light and shadow, different tones, and her composition bring the subjects and their experiences to life, Benton said.
In 1946, Gruber photographed and reported on a Jewish internment camp in Cyprus set up by the British government that was deporting Jewish refugees and Holocaust survivors there from Britain and Palestine.
Using light and bleached-out tones in her pictures, Gruber lets the viewer feel the conditions surrounding the refugees, including the "scorching sun," Benton explained.
"She had such respect for the people she met," said Megan Whitman, curator at the Laurie M. Tisch Gallery, adding that it comes through in her photos.
In 1944, Gruber secretly shepherded 1,000 refugees, mostly Holocaust survivors, on the Army ship the Henry Gibbins. The experience was a pivotal moment for her, Whitman said.
She took photos of the secret passengers, which are part of the exhibit, and told their stories, helping to educate Americans at the time about the atrocities happening in Europe.
"Ruth's work had a lot of sway on public opinion," Whitman said. Despite helping refugees and exploring the world — including the Soviet Arctic and Alaska before it was a state — she made time to raise a family.
Gruber was described by the media as the "woman of the future" when at age 20 she became the youngest woman in the world to earn a PhD for her work on author Virginia Woolf. She later went on to write more than a dozen non-fiction books and a novel, work that took her well past the typical age of retirement, Benton said.
"The camera was always one tool in her tool box," she said.
