Photography, Life and the Opposites - Hardcover

Bernstein, Len

9780984676538: Photography, Life and the Opposites

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0984676538 ISBN 13: 9780984676538

Publisher: Delia Pr, 2012

Photography, Life, and the Opposites, with a foreword by Robert Coles, is about what makes for beauty not only in Len Bernstein's chosen art, but in all the arts. And it is about life, and how art can teach us to live it. The author's critical approach is based on this historic principle stated by Eli Siegel, founder of Aesthetic Realism: All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves. You will learn what makes a photograph successful and how our most everyday and urgent questions are answered in art. Questions that affect us all, including: What makes true love possible and keeps it from fading? How should we see the people close to us, including in a time of illness? What makes us cruel to others, and how can we change? The book is illustrated with over 70 of Mr. Bernstein's stirring photographs of daily life, many of which are in public collections in the US and abroad, as well as photographs by others. Together with the text, they are a means of understanding: What does it mean to have a beautiful way of seeing people and things; a way of seeing that will make us proud? And what stops us from having it?

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About the Author:

Len Bernstein began to study photography in 1974, when he was 24 years old. The following year, he began his study of Aesthetic Realism in consultations with The Kindest Art, and later had the honor to study with the founder of Aesthetic Realism, Eli Siegel. His photographs are in many private and public collections, including The Library of Congress, Washington, DC, and Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris. Mr. Bernstein's articles have been published in the US and abroad, and his workshops have been presented at high schools and colleges, including The University of Northampton, England. He lives in New York where he continues to have the time of his life studying in professional classes with Chairman of Education Ellen Reiss at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation.

Foreword by Robert Coles James Agee Professor of Social Ethics Emeritus at Harvard University and the author of numerous books, including his series Children of Crisis, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize. He has also won a MacArthur Award, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a National Humanities Medal. He lives inMassachusetts.

Review:

I love this book and its philosophy of photography based on the Siegel Theory of Opposites. Len Bernstein's career is an exceptional one, and within these pages you will find a master photographer and critic at work.
George Hobart, former Curator of Documentary Photographs,
Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

This is the most heartfelt and intelligent book on life, relationship, and photography that I ve ever seen. With Aesthetic Realism as his personal viewfinder, the author portrays in words and his photographs, a way of seeing and relating that is honest, intimate, and kind to the myriad subjects in his camera's eye and the people in his life.
Robert Leverant, author of Zen in the Art of Photography

I'm truly honored to have received this beautiful volume of photographs. I love it and wonder how the hell I was lucky enough to be sent it. Mr. Bernstein, you have introduced me to an approach to art, based on the Aesthetic Realism of Eli Siegel, that is way beyond anything I would have entertained. Thank you, thank you!
Ed Asner, seven-time Emmy Award-winning actor

Wonderfully inspiring images and words from the Aesthetic Realism point of view.
Graham Nash, co-founder of Nash Editions and Crosby, Stills & Nash

It is clear that Len Bernstein is a connoisseur of human gesture and expression.
John Loengard, LIFE photographer and author of
Age of Silver Encounters with Great Photographers

In Len Bernstein's book, Photography, Life and the Opposites, I found a perceptive humanist with a camera. These photographs visualize who Bernstein is and his photographic commentary reveals, in the most engaging of ways, the compelling ideas about the relationship of life to art this imagecreator learned from Aesthetic Realism."
Earl Dotter, photojournalist

Len Bernstein's photographs touch the one who looks at them directly in mind and sensitivity. They are the result of a great gentleness towards people and every form of life that he meets gentleness that breeds poetry. He gets close to people, but at the perfect distance, which is a good and unusual quality in a photographer.
Anne Biroleau-Lemagny, Chief Curator,
Biblioth�que nationale de France, Paris

Len Bernstein has clearly and expertly shown us, through words and photographs, in his book Photography, Life, and the Opposites, how to find, understand, and deeply express personal feelings in our photographs and in our lives. His methods, through the use of the concept of opposites and the practice of Aesthetic Realism, help us, as photographers or viewers, to see the camera's subjects and our related life with deeper, more meaningful love and feeling. This opens us up to a much broader understanding of our true relationship to our immediate personal environment as well as our place in the mystery of human life on this planet. --Richard Garrod, photographer, educator, and author of Visual Metaphors

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