Ruth Matilda Anderson

Ruth Matilda Anderson was an American photographer who travelled in the 1920s to document Spain for the American Hispanic Society. In this decade she travelled twice to Galicia and created ​​an immense collection of photographic material, portraying towns and villages, roads and villages, women and children, houses and streets, professions and customs.

Her first trip was from August 7, 1924 to August 28, 1925, accompanied by her father, also a photographer, Alfred T. Anderson. They toured the four provinces of the region. It was on this trip when she took the majority of photographs, some 5,000 made ​​by her and another 2,000 bought from local photographers.

The second trip, from 14 November 1925 until 31 May 1926, was accompanied by another photographer of the American Hispanic Society, Frances Saplding. This time they returned to New York with 2,300 photographs. They were traveling using the few means at that time as the horse, on foot or by carrilana.

Thanks to these trips, Ruth Matilda Anderson built the largest and most important archive of photographs of Galicia, more than 10,000 images. Much of these photographs would end later embodied in her book "Gallegan provinces of Spain. Pontevedra and La Coruña". 

This book contains 400 pages and 500 photographs, of which nearly a hundred pages correspond to Costa da Morte . This book was published in 1939 in New York.