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Remembering Ruth Thorne-Thomsen
28 November 2025
Ruth Thorne-Thomsen, who photographed her "environmental collages" with a pinhole camera, died late last month from respiratory failure at a hospice facility in Philadelphia. She was 82.
She was born in New York City, the only daughter of her father, who worked for Kaiser, and her mother. But the family included four sons. The family moved to Berkeley, Calif., where they lived until she turned 12 when they moved to Lake Forest, Ill.
She studied dance in college and spent a year dancing professionally before pursuing a BFA in painting at Southern Illinois University and then a BFA in photography from Columbia College ChicagoShe then earned a master's degree in the same subject from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, graduating in 1976.
She spent a year as a staff photographer for The Chicago Sun-Times. She became a professor of photography, first at Columbia College Chicago and then at the University of Colorado Denver. At Columbia, she met Ray K. Metzker, an experimental photographer, with whom she became involved in the early 1980s before marrying in 2000.
Her sudden interest in photography is explained by a tragedy.
In 1967, her younger brother Carl was killed while serving in the Army in Vietnam. She had a few negatives of him she wanted to print so she learned how to bring them to life again.
A friend gave her a pinhole camera in graduate school and she "knew immediately that this was it. It was the blueprint, the matrix, for everything that followed."
Her grandmother and mother, both amateur photographers, encouraged her to experiment. And she spent the rest of her career doing just that, claiming of her work "it's all a mystery to me!"
She eventually moved beyond the pinhole that provided no feedback during the shoot. Her pinholes were the size of postcards and seemed to emulate the early European photographers who traveled to exotic locations to photograph the wonders of the world.
But she was also inspired by Surrealists like Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp and the painter Giorgio de Chirico, who was a favorite.
Her photography is in the permanent collections ofthe Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, both in New York City, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
She lived with her husband in a house they built together in Philadelphia until his death in 2014. She is survived by three brothers, Leif, John and Roger.