Note: for biographical information about Len Bernstein, including his study in professional classes taught by Ellen Reiss, Chairman of Aesthetic Realism, click on this link.



When I first saw this scene, I thought it was a very unexpected coming together of coldness and warmth: it’s the middle of winter with snow on the ground, people are bundled up against the cold and, yet, they look like they’re sunning themselves on the boardwalk at Coney Island. Sometimes, however, our motives are deeper than we realize, as I found out when Ellen Reiss commented on this photograph while discussing a catalogue for an exhibition I was having. It was truly an amazing education to be learning from her that a particular situation can have universal meaning, and symbolize how we hope to see reality and our relation to it. She said, in part:

“Every photograph is a oneness of the abstract and the immediate. It has shapes, geometric form that is eternal, and they are shown through people and things that are more immediate.”

And then she asked: “Is there humor in the relation of the geometric, the pure, and then something like the details?” I said I wasn’t sure, and she pointed to the diagonal of the bench which goes across the whole photograph:
 
Ellen Reiss: If you have a strong diagonal and then you have people sort of lounging all over the diagonal, do you think there is something funny about that?
 
Len Bernstein: Yes. I never saw that. It’s true.
 
Ellen Reiss: One can see this in terms of coldness and warmth, but how else could this snow be seen? What’s the difference in the effect if it were grass?
 
Len Bernstein: Well, it’s more solid in a way. I mean they literally have their feet up on it.
 
Ellen Reiss: What do you think has more of a feeling of the eternal—snow or the people?
 
Len Bernstein: Oh, snow, the white snow.
 
Ellen Reiss: It’s very white snow.
 
Len Bernstein: Yes.
 
Ellen Reiss: And do you think the purity—we know it’s snow, but white for many years has been felt to stand for purity—of all that white is in a way more in keeping with the diagonal than the people?

My response was ‘Oh, wow!” and I feel that every time I think of what she said.