Ruth Bernhard was born in Berlin in 1905 to Lucian and Gertrude Bernhard. Her parents divorced when she was only two years old, and Bernhard barely knew her mother. Her father, Emil Kahn, who was a world famous graphic designer, started to use the pseudonym Lucian Bernhard when he moved to Berlin at the turn of the 19th century. He became a professor at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin in 1923 and emigrated to New York City a few years later. Ruth Bernhard decided to join her father in the U.S., after two years of studying typography and art history at the Akademie in Berlin. Her father became a major proponent of her work and advised her frequently. After her move to New York, she started to work as a darkroom assistant at The Delineator, an American women's magazine. There, she learned the basics of photography - but was not an enthusiastic employee. The publication let her go within six months, and Bernhard used the severance pay to purchase her own camera and equipment. By the late 1920s, while living in Manhattan, Bernhard became heavily involved in the lesbian sub-culture of the artistic community. The widespread social oppression of homosexuals in the U.S. was rampant at the time and would last for most of Bernhard's life. In 1934 Bernhard was working on a commission from the MoMA, photographing works for the Machine Art exhibition catalogue. During the production, a friend posed in the nude for her inside of a large, stainless steel bowl. The resulting photograph is the first example of the black-and-white images which secured her place among the world's most distinguished photographers. With their exquisite use of light, Bernhard's radiant still-life studies and nude forms reflect her passionate search for the universal connection of all things. Inspired by the small things in life, her ideal of minimalism drove her passion for photography.
In 1935, she chanced to meet Edward Weston, one of the most innovative American photographers at the time. Deeply impressed by his work, she decided to move to California where he lived. Her work expanded to include pictures such as Doll's Head, often considered a prototype of Surrealist photography. Bernhard moved back to New York for eight years in 1939, during which time she met Alfred Stieglitz and was the subject of an issue of U.S. Camera. When she returned to California with her partner Eveline Phimster, Bernhard joined Ansel Adams, Wynn Bullock, and Imogen Cunningham as a leading photographer on the West Coast. She began a long and successful teaching career in 1967 and received the Dorothea Lange Award from the Oakland Art Museum in 1971. Two portfolios of her work, The Eternal Body and The Gift of the Commonplace, appeared in 1976, and a collection of her work, Collecting Light was published in 1979.
Bernhard's work has been exhibited in solo shows and group exhibitions, her photographs are now part of major collections, including the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana, the Museum of Photographic Arts (MOPA), San Diego, among others.
Ruth Bernhard died in San Francisco at the age of 101.