The Image Maker : In her earlier years, Ruth Mayerson Gilbert was a wife and hostess extraordinaire. Now, she’s known around the world as an artist.
At 62, she bought her first real camera, a sale-priced Yashica, picked up as impulsively as a magazine while she was at in an airport en route to Indonesia.
“The first three rolls of film came out black,” recalls Ruth Mayerson Gilbert, an elegant 82-year-old grandmother whose exotic photographs of everyday scenes have since been exhibited in museums and art galleries worldwide.
“I didn’t even know how to load the film in the camera, but I was determined to learn something about it,” she says, laughing over tea at the Westwood condo of a friend. “I didn’t really think I was capable of taking a picture with my husband’s precious Leica.”
Less than a decade after Gilbert figured out how to put the film in, her photographs were published in Zoom, the respected international photography magazine. The pictures, shot on a familiar Parisian street, were purchased by the Bibliotheque Nationale--France’s equivalent of the Library of Congress.
The photos, taken in the mid-’70s and considered classics, are still exhibited throughout the world and have been lauded by reviewers for their strangely spiritual qualities.
The subject matter that made Gilbert famous?
Men in bloodstained aprons hauling huge carcasses of freshly slaughtered meat on their backs and on top of their heads.
In Gilbert’s pictures, however, they could pass for saints.
It took her a year to get the shots she wanted, because she lived in Basel, Switzerland, and had to travel to Paris and wait for the delivery men to arrive.
“They came three times a week. I used to stand on the corner and pray they were going to deliver meat where I could see them. It was cold and damp. And when they delivered, I had 20 minutes to shoot,” she says of the photos on exhibit at the Jan Baum Gallery in Los Angeles through Saturday.
“(The meat deliverers) seem to inhabit a weightless and timeless world in which every one of their movements is guided by a power greater than their own,” critic David Pagel wrote recently in The Times.
“Their faces, when they are visible, express a trance-like serenity, a sense of self-loss that is both frightening and desirable.”
The artist herself appears more down to earth. Dynamic, warm and relentlessly charming, Gilbert looks closer to 62 than 82.
“She is one of the youngest people I know, in spirit and outlook and in the way she approaches each day,” says gallery owner Baum, who sells Gilbert’s work for $550 to $850 a print.
Regal and model slim--Gilbert worked her way through the Moore Institute of Art and the University of Pennsylvania as a nude model for artists and a swimwear model--the photographer is dressed this afternoon in a silk pants ensemble of offbeat colors that only a master artist would combine.
Ask her how she accounts for her extraordinary vitality and she doesn’t mention a word about the importance of exercise, nutrition or other health regimens.
Rather, she attributes it all to her work:
“I’m very excited by photography. And by people. I love being around certain kinds of people, creative people. . . . I have so many young friends, especially photographers. As Daniel said, ‘You know, they could have acted like you were a little old lady--go back to your knitting--but they haven’t.’ ”
Daniel is Gilbert’s live-in lover of the last 11 years, marine biologist Daniel Mazia, a younger man of 79. They share a rented house on Monterey Beach, where she runs almost every day.
Mazia taught biological sciences at UC Berkeley for 35 years. Then, when Berkeley retired him, he was hired at Stanford, where he still teaches. In addition, he regularly lectures throughout the world.
“The secret to Ruth’s vitality and love of life is that she is an artist. If you look at her work, you notice that she embraces everything. She doesn’t stand off,” says the professor, who has known Gilbert off and on for the last 60 years. They first met in their 20s while living in Philadelphia and began their courtship after the death in 1980 of Gilbert’s husband, Milton, a former Department of Commerce official.
“We both came from tough backgrounds in Philadelphia,” Mazia continues. “Poor parents. Immigrant families. We just had to reach out. Nothing was going to be done for us.”
Gilbert’s parents were Jews who had fled Russia. Her mother was a homemaker and her father an artist who supported himself by designing woodwork for the interiors of homes and businesses.
She graduated from college with a degree in fine arts and teaching, but it was the height of the Depression and jobs were scarce. Gilbert ran a puppet theater where she employed many of her out-of-work artist friends to build sets and write scripts. Eventually, she secured a junior high teaching job.
In her 20s, Gilbert experienced the worst crisis of her life. Her younger brother and only sibling died of bone cancer when he was 20. Her mother couldn’t deal with the loss and tried to commit suicide. She was institutionalized and died of cancer about six years later.
“I loved my brother,” Gilbert whispers in a soft, sad voice, still full of longing. “And I have really never gotten over it. That’s why I wanted at least three children. So they wouldn’t be alone. It was just too awful to lose my brother.”
Shortly thereafter, she met and married Milton Gilbert and moved to Washington, where he would become a celebrated economist and she would concentrate on rearing their three young children.
When their youngest was 4, the Gilberts moved to Paris. Milton became an economic adviser to what is now the OEEC (Organization for European Economic Cooperation), while his wife gained a reputation as a world-class hostess.
The Gilberts’ Parisian home was famed for salons with the well-known classical musicians of the day.
But to hear her tell it, the drawing room concerts came together as easily as a last-minute picnic: “Wonderfully talented musicians would say, ‘Ruth, I’m giving a concert on Friday. I want to try this out beforehand.’ Could you get 30 or 40 people together?’ ”
After their children had taken off for college, the Gilberts moved to Basel, where Milton worked for the Bank for International Settlements. Their kids--a commercial photographer, a statistician and computer expert for the Department of Commerce and a math teacher--are all grown and settled in careers.
It was while she and her husband lived in Basel, and were traveling to Indonesia, that Gilbert was suddenly inspired to buy the Yashica that launched her career.
She began taking photo workshops with acclaimed European photographers. One of them, Christian Vogt, helped her to get her work published in Zoom, the break that brought her fame.
She’s now partial to Nikons and Minoltas, and allows that the only trouble with being a photographer at her age is lugging around the heavy cameras and lenses.
It’s not been impossible, though. On a trip last year to Russia, where her works were exhibited, she was shooting at a river near Moscow. Gilbert recalls that a Russian man noticed her difficulties and not only carried her equipment but also “came over and scooped me up.”
She travels frequently, often returning to the same, faraway places again and again to resume photographing subjects she loves.
Cities near the Mediterranean have repeatedly drawn her, particularly Sorrento, Italy, where she has photographed elderly men playing cards by a spectacular Italian fresco that makes it look as if they’re inside a palace.
“I’m interested in the movement--not in the whole picture--but in the cards flying through the air,” Gilbert says. “Also, the character of these men who are getting real pleasure. I’ve also shot card players in Turkey, and I expect to be doing some in Russia.”
Although details are not yet final, Gilbert expects to go to Russia for 20 days in June for a Kodak-sponsored river trip with photographers, photography teachers and critics from all over the world. People have told her that this is a rather glamorous life she’s created for herself, but Gilbert doesn’t see it that way at all.
“I don’t go for the what’s traditionally considered beautiful,” she explains. “I think what I’m looking for is the spell that charges the commonplace with beauty and mystery. I’m interested in what makes the ordinary strange and wonderful.”
