Ruth Orkin and the “cinema ghost” in Cascais: how the American photojournalist used photography to simulate time
When she was just 17 years old, Ruth Orkin (1921-1985) took to the road with her bicycle, camera and 25 dollars in her pocket. The year was 1939 and the young American set out, alone, on this four-month adventure between Los Angeles and New York, where The World’s Fair was taking place, photographing whatever she found along the way to create a photographic road movie. Fica, his first photographic feature film. This first work of hers unfolds like a film, revealing her journey “in a chronological linearity typical of cinemaâ€, later assembled into albums and large sheets of paper that evoke film storyboards. And it reveals, from the outset, one of the mechanisms that the photojournalist – who would become the author of one of the most famous images of the 20th century, “American Girl in Italy†(1951) – €“ used to simulate time.
Although, in that same century, the German philosopher Walter Benjamin defined photography as an instant, a shot that froze movement, revealing only a fragmented experience of reality, Orkin challenges this concept, “including the dimension of temporality”, explains to Expresso Anne Morin, curator of the exhibition “Ruth Orkin – The Illusion of Time”, an initiative of the D. Luís I Foundation and the Cascais Municipal Council that It can be visited until July 7th at the Cascais Cultural Center. “In other words, with it photography is not just an instant, it also implies temporality, continuity and movement. They are simulations, a kind of DIY, a bit like George Méliès did in his first films. Ruth Orkin uses the camera to simulate cinema.â€
