Orkin’s unerring eye

She's best known for one celebrated image of an American girl braving a sea of leering Italian men, but photographer Ruth Orkin had a bit more to offer than just that. Born to a silent movie star in 1921, image-making was in her blood and by the mid 1940s she was a hard-grafting photojournalist working for top US publications such as Life, Esquire and Cosmopolitan. She would affectionately capture life on the streets of post-depression New York as well as European cities during her lone travels abroad. With characteristic assertiveness, Orkin described it simply as "making people look at what I want them to look at".