'The Man Who Waited'

View Slideshow


Mr. Bergman was born in New Orleans and raised mostly in Minneapolis. He began taking and developing snapshots at age 6, and save for a few teenage years he has strived to be a great photographer-artist ever since. But he has remained an out-of-step one, isolated from contemporary tastes, a cult figure to the few who have seen his work in person or in a 1998 book.

Finally, and separately, Sarah Greenough, senior curator of photographs at the National Gallery, and Phong Bui, a curatorial adviser at P.S.1, decided to give Mr. Bergman shows. The works that will go on display later this month were shot from the mid-1980s to about 1996. They are intense, soul-stirring, intimate color portraits, all untitled, all unlabeled as to place or person: There's just a date and a few technical details. Stripped of information, the viewer is forced to consider the human condition.

Mr. Bergman won't explain his art: "It's visual," he says. "I don't need to talk about it." But he does tell the story of a subject in the Bronx who asked him where he was from. When Mr. Bergman said "Minnesota," the man said, "You come all this way only to see yourself."

One day, in 1966, a friend showed him a book that changed his life—Robert Frank's "The Americans." As soon as he saw Frank's empathetic pictures of ordinary people, he purchased a Nikon 35mm.

It wasn't that Mr. Bergman imitated Mr. Frank. Rather, he says, "what was so breathtaking about Frank was that his work proved that the main thing one needed was a personal vision, and the main thing one needed to serve that vision was intuition and feeling."

Went to see the exhibit on Sunday 15 November, at PS 1. The photo were large, unlabeled, several pictures to a room. Each subject was centered in the frame; only one was smiling. The PS 1 space has very high ceilings, creaking floors, and big windows. It was very enjoyable.