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Plaza in the Snow
Ruth Orkin
1976
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Born in Hollywood to a toy manufacturer and a silent-film actress, Ruth Orkin was a photographer and filmmaker. Her first major project was her documentation of a bicycle trip from Los Angeles to New York to the 1939 World’s Fair, when she was seventeen. Later a professional photojournalist, Orkin achieved renown in 1951 for her photograph An American Girl in Italy, from a series chronicling the experiences of women traveling alone. The following year, she and her husband, Morris Engel, produced Little Fugitive, a feature film that was nominated for an Academy Award in 1953. In the 1970s and 1980s, she took a series of photographs of Central Park from the window of her apartment; it was published in two acclaimed books, A World through My Window, and More Pictures from My Window.
At the close of Independence Day 1972
a biplane plane rose
in the Tel-Aviv sky at dusk
and on its belly
moving lights flashed:
For health and pleasure eat plenty of poultry
Eat as you should…
It all began one wild dawn
The barges slid by under torrents of rain
The clouds raced past shredded and torn
above charcoal-glinting roofs
Two bourgeois dogs passed by with a sideways gait
The…