Artist is the fifth
living photographer
to be given solo show at National Gallery Can’t we all just get along?
It’s more often heard as a punchline than as a sincere question. It’s also the unspoken — unimposed — query behind the photographs of portraitist Robert Bergman, who has a gift for ennobling his anonymous subjects simply by letting them be. He’s so wary of “imposing narrative,” as he put it in a conversation on a recent visit to Washington, that all of his portraits are untitled. He also feels compelled to withhold the identify of his “collaborators.” Other portraitists call them “subjects.”
Whatever you call them, attaching words, particularly names, to these sober, contemplative faces would only distract the viewer, he says. And anyway, words are beside the point.
“I didn’t say, ‘Hey, can I tell your life story?’ ” Bergman explained. “I didn’t ask for that permission, because it didn’t interest me. My art is about feeling and form.”
Bergman’s portraits offer the appearance of spontaneity while maintaining a meticulous formalism. In that way, they bear the influence of his friend Robert Frank.
Bergman divides his time between Minneapolis, where his body of work is stored, and Manhattan, where he borrows a friend’s apartment and studio.
In 1985, he switched from working in stark monochrome to vivid color. He made a gift of 90 color portraits to the National Gallery of Art this year, of which 33 will remain on view through Jan. 10, the majority of them never exhibited previously.
Bergman, 65, is only the fifth living photographer to be given a solo show at the National Gallery. Incredibly, it’s his first solo gallery exhibition anywhere.
The honor is clearly a thrill for a man whose sense of modesty comes through even when he’s speaking with great satisfaction and insight about his work. He’s articulate, though given to quoting other people liberally when discussing what he does. Contemplating his approach to portraiture, he cites the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s line that “Love consists in this, that two solitudes border and protect and salute each other.” Considering the boost to his profile resulting from an NGA solo exhibition, he reels off part of Goethe’s dedication of “Faust.”
Most of all, he cites “the author I admire most,” novelist Toni Morrison. The Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning author penned an anecdotal, discursive but unforgettable introduction to Bergman’s 1998 book of photographs, “A Kind of Rapture.” Titled “The Fisherwoman,” the essay meditates on the way we greet strangers; sorting them, reducing them and denying them the individual consideration we insist on for ourselves. (Morrison made a rare public appearance at the gallery to read “The Fisherwoman” aloud last month.)
Bergman’s pictures, Morrison seems to imply, refuse to sort, reduce or deny.
His method is almost purely instinctual. He uses no special lighting or other means of shaping the environment. “I attempt to use forms in the service of intuition and feeling,” he says.
So does that mean he always knows when he’s got the shot?
“You usually have the instinct in the moment. Oftentimes, I’ll just shoot one or two pictures and I know I got it,” he said. “Other times, I’ll shoot a lot of pictures and know that I don’t have what I want. And then finally I hit it, and things feel differently inside of me.”
With the show scheduled to remain on view 10 days into the new year, Bergman is still hopeful President Obama will see it.
“He reached out to Toni for an endorsement of his candidacy,” Bergman points out. “He personally called her and requested it — not his staff.
“Maybe she can entice him to look at Bob Bergman’s pictures,” he said with a laugh.
