Ruthy was my neighbor and my friend. Because of our sixty-one year age difference, I told friends that she was like a grandmother to me, but often she felt more like a second mother or even a sister. We shared many emotional moments as well as innumerable fits of laughter. Her upbringing in 1920's and 30's Berlin seemed somehow similar to mine in the 70's and 80's New York. We understood each other very well.

Ruthy adored music and was a talented singer, though poverty and World War II prevented her from pursuing it as a career. She also had a zest for life and an openness toward other people, which was surprising given her history as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. Ruthy could easily have become untrusting and bitter, especially after her many years of servitude for wealthy English families during the Blitz in London, but instead she maintained an innocence (or perhaps a denial) about all that she had endured. She simply loved meeting new people and would stop to talk to anyone on the street who even looked her way.

When she died, I was incredibly sad. To mourn this loss and to fully understand that she was gone, I needed to photograph her apartment and her absence from it. I had spent all of my childhood visiting her, as she lived in the apartment directly above ours. After her husband had died, eight years earlier, we would often hear through the ceiling her shoes making little click click noises as she wandered from one room to the next. The loneliness was devastating to her. In this same way, after she died, I wandered lost from room to room with my camera, trying to capture all the material elements left behind: the furniture she and her husband had picked out as immigrants in the 1950's; personal belongings that still smelled like her. There was suddenly a plethora of household items which had previously just blended into the background. Now, with her no longer there to hold all my attention, they were suddenly very pronounced and I photographed them.



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