KEY POINTS:
Renowned photographer Ruth Bernhard, whose black-and-white images of compelling shapes from female nudes to seashells is regarded as still-life art, has died. She was 101.
Bernhard worked with some of her greatest contemporaries including Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Wynn Bullock and Dorothea Lange. Adams once called her "the greatest photographer of the nude." Born in 1905 as the daughter of noted type designer Lucian Bernhard, she bought a box camera in New York in 1929 and started making a living doing commercial photography.
A few years later, she moved to Los Angeles, where a chance encounter on the beach with photographer Edward Weston in 1935 changed the direction of her career. He remained her mentor for years.
