Robert Bergman Selected Portraits Essay by David Levi Strauss

With just a handheld 35 mm camera and natural lighting, Robert Bergman explores his subjects with an evident determination to record a connection, even at the expense of surroundings, which Bergman tends to carefully forfeit as a compositional element. The series documented in this catalogue, produced for Bergman's exhibition at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, charts the evolving character of Americans at the turn 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."