Ruth Orkin was many things: photojournalist, filmmaker, author with her husband Morris Engel of the independent feature film Little fugitive, awarded the Silver Lion at the 1953 Venice Film Festival. Born in Boston in 1921, she grew up in Hollywood where her mother, Mary Ruby, was an established silent film actress. At the age of ten, she received her first camera as a gift, a Univex costing 39 cents, and immediately began experimenting by photographing friends and teachers at school. At 17, she decided to cycle across America, leaving from Los Angeles and arriving in New York for the 1939 World's Fair. Ruth Orkin was many things, but above all she was a modern, courageous woman who wanted to be a filmmaker and who, opposed by an exclusively male world like that of cinema in those years, had to find her place elsewhere, not giving up on her dream, but approaching it in a different way, creating a singularly rich and new language through photography.