Abstract
It was the great Dorothea Lange who said, “The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” But just what is that way of seeing? And what can a good photograph teach us, technically, about how to see people and things with meaning we can respect? I began to learn the answers to these questions in the summer of 1974 when I started to photograph seriously. I fell in love with photography then and felt I was lucky to have finally found something that meant so much to me that I never wanted to stop learning about it. I didn’t know that my good fortune was only beginning, for photography was to lead me to the explanation of beauty and what it can teach each of us about how we need to see the world and people—including ourselves. “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” This landmark principle, stated by the great American philosopher Eli Siegel, is at the heart of Aesthetic Realism, the education he founded in 1941. I’ve had the thrill of testing it over the years in thousands of instances, from the first known photograph taken by the French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce around 1826, to the most modern work of today. The photographic image, I have learned, is an aesthetic object and a democratic blueprint for life.
Presenters
Leonard BernsteinAuthor, Photography, Life, and the Opposites, Pennsylvania, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
2025 Special Focus—From Democratic Aesthetics to Digital Culture
KEYWORDS
Aesthetics, Ethics, Democratic, Photography, Life, Opposites
