The Education of Len Bernstein

My training as a photographer and teacher began when I had the rare opportunity in 1974 to meet and be accepted as a student by the well-known and respected humanist photographer Lou Bernstein who had been a member of the Photo League, important in the history of photography. He had also studied with the esteemed American poet, critic, and founder of Aesthetic Realism, Eli Siegel, and what I learned from Lou began to open my eyes to what beauty is and how to be fair to it with a camera.

My formal education took on greater scope and depth when I began to attend classes in 1975 at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York City. These classes, in photography, poetry, art criticism, music and more, are based on this philosophic principle stated by Eli Siegel: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

By chance I had met what most only dream of, a way of seeing the world and oneself that is true, and I am everlastingly grateful for this. At the Foundation, I studied with photographer and poet Nancy Starrels in her class, “The Honoring Eye.” There were other ground-breaking classes, including “Critical Inquiry”, and “The Visual Arts and the Opposites”, taught respectively by important American painters and critics, Dorothy Koppelman and Marcia Rackow.

I studied directly with Eli Siegel in 1977, and in 1978 began attending professional classes for Consultants and Associates with Aesthetic Realism Chair of Education, Ellen Reiss. In her classes the arts and sciences are seen as the means of understanding and integrating every aspect of a person’s life. These decades of satisfying study have educated me, strengthened my desire to see meaning in things, enabled me to go beyond my first, often surface, impression, of what I see and photograph, to begin to discern the ethics and aesthetics of a situation. This is the education that has made me the photographer and teacher I am proud to be. There is no degree program at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation. One never truly graduates from learning how to see the world and what it deserves from us, and, in my experience, there is no more crucial or pleasure giving study.