Street Photography – Looking for Meaning and Finding It!

Join FMoPA for an online seminar with photographer, educator, and author Len Bernstein as he gives a talk titled “Street Photography—Looking for Meaning and Finding It!” He will comment on a wide range of images, including from the current exhibition, “Icons of Black & White”. His own experience photographing on the street for almost 50 years has taught him that certain questions are always present: “What is composition—and how can we find it in the seeming disorder of a street scene?”, “What is the source of the discomfort or nervousness we can feel in the midst of people we are trying to photograph?”, and “What is the relation of what I feel about my subject to the technical decisions I make, such as point-of-view, or choice of f stop and lens?” He writes of the answers to these questions in his book, Photography, Life, and the Opposites, from which he will read selections as part of this talk.

Mr. Bernstein says, “Over the years, I have seen, with this principle stated by Eli Siegel, the founder of Aesthetic Realism, as my basis, that our questions about art and life can be answered: ‘All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.’ The opposites—including Black & White—are eternal, and if we love and respect them, they will reveal their meaning in the most fleeting of moments.”