Eva Rubinstein

My life has been full and never dull—from being a winter baby born in August (in Buenos Aires, Argentina) to traveling as a small child with my parents across oceans and countries or being left behind for months, missing them, especially my mother. Before leaving Europe at the age of 6 in 1939, I had already been studying ballet for a year, and this led eventually to some years in ballet, then theater, in California and New York. Marriage and children followed. Although the marriage was incredibly lively and interesting, it also began to fall apart for a myriad reasons, and I was faced with “what now?” At that moment I saw, for the first time, a photographic print coming to life in the developer and in a flash imagined the endless possibilities of a life in that world. With a lot of help, and quite a bit of luck, some of those possibilities actually did become part of my life in photography and taught me more about myself (for good or ill) and life in general than I could have foreseen. And I still get goose-bumps remembering the moment when I first saw that print come up…