Ruth Robertson


Ruth Agnes McCall Robertson Marietta was an American photojournalist who accomplished many "firsts" for women photographers and is also known mostly for photographing Angel Falls in Venezuela and surveying them to establish them as tallest waterfalls in the world; it was published in National Geographic magazine, November 1949. She was born in Taylorville, Illinois.

Biography

Robertson was a ground-breaking photographer who in 1939 was hired by The Peoria Evening Star newspaper as its first “girl photographer.”Three years later Robertson moved to Chicago and began working for Acme News Pictures, which later became United Press International. While working for Acme, Robertson co-founded an independent news service called Press Syndicate. Through this connection Robertson received photographic assignments which made her the first female photographer allowed onto the baseball infield at Wrigley Field in 1943, and the "only female photographer at the 1944 Democratic and Republican conventions."
Robertson had been a journalist during World War II and after she returned to her routine job at the New York Herald Tribune, felt that her "life lost its thrill." In 1949, Robertson eagerly accepted an assignment to Venezuela. She became interested in Angel Falls and initially took aerial photographs. On April 23, 1949, she set out on an expedition to the base with the Latvian explorer Aleksandrs Laime to reach the falls. They traveled on the Churún River in dugout canoes and endured downpours of rain. On May 12, they finally reached the falls. The expedition was the first documented expedition, which included ten Kamarakoto natives, to reach the foot of the falls, and was also the first to measure them.
Robertson stayed in Venezuela for the next 12 years, and became the editor of the Daily Journal, and subsequently moved to Mexico, before returning to the U.S. in the mid-1960s, and re-locating to Rosenberg, Texas, where she died in 1998.
The Ruth Robertson Archives have been preserved at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas in Austin.

Associations