P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (MoMA) to feature Robert Bergman: Selected Portraits

Written by Elizabeth Granville Wednesday, 26 August 2009 00:36

New York, NY - P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (MoMA) is pleased to announce Robert Bergman: Selected Portraits, an exhibition of twenty-four large-scale color portraits of everyday people the artist photographed on the streets of various American cities from 1985 to 1997. The exhibition will be on view in the first floor Drawing and Painting Galleries. Robert Bergman (b. 1944, New Orleans) now divides his time between Minnesota and New York City. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue featuring an essay by David Levi Straus. On exhibition October 25, 2009 through January 4, 2010.

Using a handheld 35mm camera and precisely integrated natural lighting, Bergman explores both the poignant expressions of each individual and the formal structures of their surroundings. As art historian Meyer Schapiro wrote, "Certain photographers-Robert Frank, as well as Robert Bergman, come to mind-discover, like the poets, otherwise ignored qualities of the person and environment, hidden moments of feeling, and present them to our entranced scrutiny-for our meditation."

For more than 40 years, Robert Bergman (b. 1944) has traveled the streets and back alleys of the United States, photographing the people and scenes he encounters. Beginning in the 1960s, he, like so many other so-called street photographers of that generation, used a 35mm camera to make black-and-white photographs. In the 1980s Bergman began to work in color. Using no special lighting or equipment, he made a series of monumental portraits of the people he met.

Bergman's epic series of portraits documents the physical and spiritual manifestation of Americans at the approach of the millennium. Of this series Toni Morrison has written, "Occasionally there arises an event or a moment that one knows immediately will forever mark a place in the history of artistic endeavor.  Robert Bergman's portraits represent such a moment, such an event.  In all its burnished majesty his gallery refuses us unearned solace and one by one by one each photograph unveils us, asserting a beauty, a kind of  rapture, that is as close as can be to a master template of the singularity, the community, the unextinguishable sacredness of the human race."  

Visit  P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center at : http://www.ps1.org/

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