My (Jason) photography knowledge is pretty thin, so I was happy to see this article on NPR titled "A Woman Of Photos And Firsts, Ruth Gruber At 100." As the article explains:
At the age of 100, Ruth Gruber is responsible for a lot of firsts. When she was just 20, she became the youngest Ph.D. ever at the University of Cologne in Germany. She was the first photojournalist, much less female journalist, to travel to and cover both the Soviet Arctic and Siberian gulag. She documented Holocaust survivors and the plight of the ship, the Exodus 1947.
In other words, "She was just a badass -- no other way describe it," as Maya Benton is quoted in the article.
The short article also touches very clearly on some of the ethnographic issues of positionality anthropologists often face, for good or for bad. As the article says "being a woman gave her an advantage in getting sources to reveal themselves" and includes this exchange as an example of this advantage in action:
In 1944, she spent two weeks on the Henry Gibbins, a ship of 1,000 Jewish refugees, many of them clad in striped concentration camp uniforms, on a voyage from Italy to America.
She recalls: "Some of the men said, 'We can't tell you what we went through, it's too obscene. You're a young woman!' I said, 'Forget I'm a woman, you are the first witnesses coming to America.' So they talked. Nobody refused to talk."
