An American in paradise

From gatecrashing balls with Dior and Dalí to flirting with Florentines, New York photographer Ruth Orkin would stop at nothing to get the perfect shot

On September 3 1951, Count Carlos de Beistegui held a costumed ball at the Palazzo Labia in Venice. A swarm of gondolas brought a thousand guests – among them, Christian Dior, Salvador Dalí and the Duchess of Devonshire – who arrived in a spume of powder, feathers, boned silk and gold leaf, and proceeded to cut loose until six in the morning.

The Count had invited a handful of photographers to chronicle his Bal Oriental. Ruth Orkin, a 30-yearold American, was not one of them, but that didn’t stop her from sneaking in, disguised in a black “domino” costume (a hooded cloak worn with a half mask), to dart delightedly among the ritzy crowd. “Two orchestras, lanterns, fireworks,” she wrote in her journal, in pink ink. “The whole scene really outdid Hollywood.” A picture that Orkin took that night, of Orson Welles in a satin turban and cloak, is one of 50 of her photographs up for sale at Bonhams New York on February 2, in an auction to mark what would have been her 100th birthday.

As her gatecrashing of the Bal Oriental might suggest, Orkin, who died in 1985 at the age of 63, lived by her own rules. When she was 17, for instance, she announced to her parents that she would be cycling and hitchhiking from their home in Los Angeles to see the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. She did a trial run to San Francisco first, after which they had no say in the matter.

“Ruth lived a large life,” says her daughter, Mary, who now manages her mother’s archive. “She had this incredible confidence, this passion for everything.”

If you’ve seen an Orkin picture before, it’s likely American Girl in Italy (1951), a highlight of the Bonhams sale. The photograph shows her friend, Jinx, head held high and clasping a shawl as she walks through a covey of astonishingly unsubtle catcalling men on a street in Florence.

Orkin was on her way back to New York from a shoot in Israel at the time, and had only recently met Jinx, whose real name was Ninalee Allen. The two women were staying in the same dollar-a-night hotel, and hit it off immediately; they cooked up the photo to capture how it felt to be a woman travelling alone.

It was published in Cosmopolitan the following September, with an article offering “the tip off on money, men and morals to see you through a gay trip and a safe one”. To the horror of Allen’s father, it also appeared on a billboard in

Grand Central Station, though Allen herself, who died in 2018, always insisted that her apparent distress in the picture did not reflect her true feelings. “I felt like Beatrice walking through the streets of Florence,” she said. “And that at any moment I might be discovered by Dante himself.”

For Bonhams expert Laura Paterson: “The picture has an intimacy to it that I think Ruth managed to get in all of her pictures. Even when she photographs celebrities, she catches something a little sentimental, almost nostalgic, and who doesn’t respond to that?”

Born in 1921, Orkin was the only child of Mary Ruby, a silent-film actress, and Samuel Orkin, who sold toy boats. Raised in golden-age Hollywood, she was given her first camera, a plastic Univex costing 39¢, at the age of 10, and her own fully functioning darkroom at 14.

By 1943, Orkin was in New York, and on speed dial for photo editors at Life and Look during the heyday of those magazines, when competition to be on their payroll was fierce. But even as a female photographer in what was then a man’s world, “she never resorted to being that kind of macho ‘gal’ type,” says Paterson. “She knew who she was and what she was good at, and that was what she did. It worked.”

Many of Orkin’s images have the air of a film-still – a legacy of her upbringing. She and her mother were cinema mad, and Orkin kept a record of every movie she saw. Among her favourites were Pygmalion and Citizen Kane. She even wrote to Welles as a young girl, which gives that portrait of him in Venice an added poignancy.

Orkin married a filmmaker, too – Morris Engel, whom she met when he was working as a photographer in New York. After their wedding in 1952, the two worked side-by-side on a number of films, including Little Fugitive (1953), which won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival and received an Academy Award nomination. François Truffaut credited it with having started the French New Wave.

Engel, Orkin and their two children (as well as Mary, there is Andy, three years her senior) lived in a two bedroom apartment in Central Park West. “It was gorgeous,” says Mary, “but just stuffed with cameras and films and folders and prints. At some point, my father decided to use the bathroom as his darkroom. What with all the trays, you could barely move. You certainly couldn’t take a shower.”

By the mid-1960s, Orkin had suffered the first bout of the cancer that would eventually kill her. Her initial convalescence coincided with a decline in commissions from Life and Look, as picture magazines lost their former grip on the market, and so she found herself spending more and more of her time in the apartment, with two small children.

But she turned the challenges of the situation to her advantage. “She installed 500W floodlights in every room, and would shoot whatever we were doing,” says Mary, telling me that her mother also spent hours at the window, photographing whatever was going on below. “My situation was ideal,” Orkin later wrote, “although I don’t remember thinking of it that way at the time.”

“Those years were a struggle for her,” says Mary, “she was not a solitary person. She wanted to live big. She wanted more. I know this not from something she said, but from who she was, and she shared who she was completely. Her photographs say it all.”

‘Ruth lived a large life. She had an incredible confidence, a passion for everything’

Free-wheeling: Ruth Orkin in 1939