SAN FRANCISCO — Renowned photographer Ruth Bernhard, whose black-and-white images of compelling shapes from female nudes to seashells was regarded as still-life art, has died. She was 101.

Bernhard died Monday in her San Francisco apartment, according to the city Medical Examiner’s Office.

In 1953, Bernhard moved to this city, where she befriended and worked with some of her greatest contemporaries including Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Wynn Bullock and Dorothea Lange.

Adams once called her “the greatest photographer of the nude.”

One of her most famous photographs, “In the Box, Horizontal, 1962,” shows a sleeping woman stretched sensuously in a rectangular box, wearing only a headband.

Born in Germany in 1905 as the daughter of noted type designer Lucian Bernhard, she immigrated to New York in 1929. She bought a box camera, and soon started making a living doing commercial photography.

A few years later, she moved to Los Angeles, where a chance encounter on the beach with photographer Edward Weston in 1935 changed the direction of her career. He remained her mentor for years.

“I understood the craft of photography when done by an artist is art,” she said in “Illuminations,” a 1988 documentary about her life.

As her reputation grew, she returned to New York. A whole issue of Natural History Magazine was devoted to her photos of seashells.

Bernhard, who returned to California after World War II, also was a respected teacher, remembered affectionately for the warmth and optimism she exhibited during a party held in honor of her 100th birthday.

“She was like this little sparrow, this little tiny thing, but she was enrapturing,” said Sandra Phillips, senior curator for photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which has Bernhard’s work in its permanent collection. “She had people spellbound when she talked to them.”

Bernhard is survived by two brothers, Karl of Afton, N.Y., and Alexander of London.