RUTH ORKIN

This truly great photograph by the brilliant photographer Ruth Orkin has always troubled me and feel like it is saying so much about the male gaze and oppression of women in the street, nit least the cultural bias against Italian men and their attitude to women; cat calling, wolf whistling, harassment etc but recently discovered this text (below and it is alway worth questioning our attitudes I guess . . . . 

Ruth Orkin

'American Girl in Italy', Florence, 1951

 

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Ruth Orkin

American Girl in Italy, Florence, 1951

Ruth Orkin travelled to Italy, where she met Ninalee Craig, known at the time as Jinx Allen, a fellow American who was also travelling alone. It was a photograph of Jinx being stared at as she passed through a group of men that was to become Orkin’s most recognisable image. Orkin was 29 when she took the photograph and included it as part of a series, later published in Cosmopolitan magazine, entitled Don’t Be Afraid to Travel Alone.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2021/jan/12/american-photographer-ruth-orkin-in-pictures

Wikipedia_“In 1951, Ninalee Craig, then using the name “Jinx Allen”,[3] went on a six-month tour of Europe. While in Florence, Italy, she met photographer Ruth Orkin and the two became friends. Orkin photographed Craig as she walked around Florence capturing images of her shopping at markets, flirting in cafés, viewing landmarks, and other travel experiences.[4] The most iconic of the photos is known as American Girl in Italy and shows Craig walking down a street being ogled by a group of men.[5]

Many interpret the photograph as one of harassment and chauvinism.[6] In 2014, Craig said: “At no time was I unhappy or harassed in Europe”.[7] “[The photograph is] not a symbol of harassment. It’s a symbol of a woman having an absolutely wonderful time!”[4] She has also noted that “Italian men are very appreciative, and it’s nice to be appreciated. I wasn’t the least bit offended.”[8] 

http://tweedlandthegentlemansclub.blogspot.com/2019/06/remembering-ninalee-craig-and-american.html

“Ninalee Allen Craig died on May 1st 2018,  The star of one of the 20th century’s most famous and controversial images was 90. THE photograph, by Ruth Orkin, was called “American Girl in Italy, Florence, 1951”. Whenever it surfaced, in restaurants, in students’ rooms, on T-shirts, on tote bags, so did the questions for Ninalee Allen Craig, who walked at its heart through a phalanx of Italian men. They stared and leered; one grabbed his crotch; their calls were almost audible. Wasn’t she afraid? Surely she was upset? Her downcast eyes, that clutch of her shawl, strongly suggested both those things. Then she would laugh her boisterous full laugh and say, not at all. On the contrary, she was imagining she was Dante’s Beatrice. She had studied the “Divine Comedy” with Robert Fitzgerald at Sarah Lawrence in New York, and had fallen in love with that notion of unattainable beauty. Her dollar-a-night hotel was on the Arno, and she had a corny postcard of a Victorian painting by Henry Holiday that showed Beatrice walking by the river, in shining white, ignoring the stricken Dante, who pressed his pounding heart at the sight of her. Who knew whether her very own Dante might not be standing on some corner, while she swept luminously by?”