Ruth Bernhard, a pioneer among women photographers who was best known for her abstract images of female nudes, has died at age 101, reports Mary Rourke for the Los Angeles Times. A resident of San Francisco since the early 1950s, Bernhard died at her home Monday, December 18, of natural causes. In a photographic style marked by dramatic lighting, pared-down compositions, and materials from everyday life, Bernhard created a small but important body of work. She became known for her still-life photographs, as well as for nudes, and credited her friend and mentor Edward Weston as her main inspiration. “I had not respected photography until I met him,” she once said of Weston. “I began then to take myself seriously as an artist.”