Ruth Gruber was the youngest PhD graduate in the world, earning her degree at the age of 20 with a doctoral thesis on Virginia Woolf (the first academic work on the author), when she trudged out into the Arctic and became the first journalist to interview prisoners at a Soviet Gulag in 1935. Born in 1911 in Brooklyn to Russian Jewish immigrants, she was a long way from home, but it was just the beginning of an international journey that would take her from remote corners of pre-statehood Alaska to the harrowing postwar internment camps of Europe. Now 104 years old, she’s had one of the most intrepid photography careers of the 20th century, and that legacy is being celebrated in Ruth Gruber, Photojournalist at Brooklyn College Library.

A Photographer Who Tracked Displacement, from Soviet Gulags to Ethiopia’s Civil War