They go up the hill and reach the chestnut grove where everything converges. Ruth talks to the people and observes every detail, such as the groups of people and animals that gather around the trees to negotiate. And, finally, they discover the vestiges of traditional costume they hadn’t come across in Vigo: felt hats, wooden clogs, corduroy trousers, colourful fabrics, and even a fragment of Sorolla’s painting of a peasant. Let’s take a break here from Ruth and Alfred, who are going to visit Pazo de Oca (Manor House), where they will only have liquid dynamite, that is, augardente or firewater, for breakfast in a tavern, and then they will tour part of the province.
Ruth will make more expeditions to Extremadura, Morocco, the Canary Islands, Portugal and Brazil. She becomes more and more focused on costumes, although without losing their context. She returns to Spain repeatedly, although, at the end of the ‘40s, she verifies the almost total loss of the use of the traditional dress. At the Hispanic, she organizes an exhibition on dances, writes monographs, and participates in collective publications, but above all, she is remembered for works such as Gallegan provinces of Spain. Pontevedra and La Coruña, published in 1939 and from where we took some of the quotes; and Hispanic Costume, 1480-1530, from 1979, about historical clothing that represents the culmination of her career. We do not know if she returned to Galicia after 1926, although it makes such a lasting impression on her that a work colleague calls her ‘la gallega’. Furthermore, at the museum’s celebrations, she always wears a typical gold cross with a black velvet ribbon of traditional Galician dress around her neck.
The influence of Sorolla’s paintings will remain and Ruth will work until retirement in the room where they are still displayed today. At this point, it won’t be surprising to know that even after retiring she works at the Hispanic, the institution that so greatly transformed the girl from Nebraska. Also on a religious level, to the dismay of Alfred, she exchanged baptism for Christian Science, professed by her fellow workers, focused on the healing power of prayer. In fact, when she was old, she refused to go to the doctor and turned to prayers to heal a wound on her wrist. She died in 1983.
Her photographic legacy consists of more than fifteen thousand photographs, 5249 of them taken in Galicia.
The will to overcome stood out above others in her career. Life presented her with constant challenges and obstacles. In 1977, she was asked for advice for the new generation of female photographers and, appealing to perseverance, she exclaimed ‘Go on, do it! Bring the results!‘.
In this walk, we wanted to pay tribute to her, and to do so we tried to document not only the external but also to reveal part of her inner self, even if that meant discovering obstacles – Leviathans – sometimes physical, sometimes invisible. We discovered someone who, with respect and dignity, gave us 5249 opportunities to discover, or not, our own Leviathans.
Thank you very much for your attention. We hope you enjoyed the walk.