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P H O T O G R A P H E R S
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The Terrain Gallery
is proud to present an exhibition featuring the work
of three photographers who have seen the tremendous value of Aesthetic
Realism for art and for life:
LOUIS DIENES 
DAVID BERNSTEIN
LEN BERNSTEIN
Aesthetic Realism was founded by the great American poet and critic Eli
Siegel in 1941. In nearly four decades of teaching he showed: "The world,
art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites."
Eli Siegel was at once the most comprehensive and the most exact critic,
magnificently just to the particularity of every work he considered, every
subject, every person.
Louis Dienes, David Bernstein, and Len Bernstein had the honor to study
in classes taught by Mr. Siegel in which he lectured on all the arts and
sciences, including photography — and spoke to artists about their work
technically and in relation to how they saw the world.
In "Aesthetic Realism As Beauty: Photography," Eli Siegel’s definitive
1951 lecture, he placed the importance of photography as an art — at a
time when many people still questioned whether it was art at all — and
he showed its large meaning for people’s lives:
Wherever a specific mind
joins with an object to make that object something more than it would be
without that specific mind, then something like the beauty of art occurs.
That means that all art is a making one of the impersonal and personal
.... At the beginnings of photography, the accent was on the instrument,
not on the person, although out of the very earliest work came things that
are still remembered; it seems the personal was present anyway . . . .
In Aesthetic Realism, the
relation between a self seeing and the object that it can see is the crucial
relation in life .... The photograph is a big event in the history of the
relation of the perception of self to objects .... Photography does dramatize
light and shade, softness and sharpness, foreground and background; does
dramatize where drama is: that is, in the surfaces, the depths, the relations
of things .... Photography is the history of how exactitude changes into
meaning.
The
Aesthetic Realism of Eli Siegel is the most beautiful, honest, and vitally
needed education in the world. After centuries of man’s thought, Eli Siegel
has answered the question "What is beauty?" His Fifteen Questions, Is
Beauty the Making One of Opposites?, first published by the Terrain
Gallery in February 1955, are the universal criterion, describing what
is present in every instance of beauty in the art of all centuries. Now
every person can proudly know why he or she loves a work of art. And now
every person can love art more.
About
the Photographers
 Louis
Dienes, poet and photographer, was born in 1925 in Asheville,
NC, grew up in the Boston area, attended Browne & Nichols, MIT, and
New York University, and began his study of Aesthetic Realism in 1943.
His poems have been published in The Georgia Review, Black Mountain
Review, Pegasus, The Midland Poetry Review, and in the book Personal
& Impersonal (New York: Definition Press, 1959).
From 1956-1960, Mr.
Dienes photographed paintings, drawings, and sculpture for artists, and
from 1959-1993 worked as a photographer in scientific research laboratories.
He has exhibited in numerous group shows and in 1962 had a one-man show
at the Terrain Gallery. In the 1960’s he exhibited, as did David Bernstein,
with the Aesthetic Realism Photographers in travelling exhibitions throughout
the United States. He has been on the staff of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation
since 1988, and is currently at work on a book on objects, combining writing
and photography.
David
M. Bernstein was born in New York City in 1936. He graduated
from Brooks Institute of  Photographic
Arts and Sciences in California, and after serving 4 years as a scientific
photographer for the Air Force, he returned to New York to work in commercial
photographic studios. He began his study of Aesthetic Realism in 1962.
Mr. Bernstein has taught photography at the New York Institute of Photography,
Germain School of Photography, and Pratt-Phoenix School of Design and has
worked in such diversified photographic fields as medical, aerospace, theatrical,
commercial, and portrait, as well as dye transfer color printing. His photographs
have been published in Camera 35, Encyclopedia Britannica, The New York
Times, Time, Nordisk Tidende, Caribbean Life, and African Sun Times.
David Bernstein has
had one-man shows at the New York World’s Fair (1964), Brooklyn College
(1974), Sala de Cultura in Pamplona, Spain (1976), and is a co-author of
Aesthetic Realism: We Have Been There, Six Artists on the Siegel Theory
of Opposites, (New York: Definition Press, 1969).
Len
Bernstein has been photographing since 1974, and he studied
with Nancy Starrels, photographer and Aesthetic Realism consultant, in
the class The Honoring Eye. His Aesthetic
Realism education began in consultations in 1975, and he studied in classes
taught by Eli Siegel beginning in 1977. His work has appeared in many group
shows, including "Recent Acquisitions: Photography," at the New York Public
Library. He recently had a 25-year retrospective exhibition at Pleiades
Gallery in SoHo. Mr. Bernstein’s photographs are in collections including:
The Brooklyn Museum; The New York Public Library; Museum of the City of
New York; The Library of Congress; The Baltimore Museum of Art; Hebrew
Home for the Aged, Riverdale, NY, and the Aesthetic Realism Foundation/Terrain
Gallery, NYC.
Louis
Dienes, David Bernstein, and Len Bernstein are each now studying to teach
Aesthetic Realism in classes taught by Ellen Reiss, the Class Chairman
of Aesthetic Realism.
Review
of this exhibition
Len
Bernstein, photographic education
Louis
and Amy Dienes, photography and essays
David
Bernstein, fine art photography
About
Eli Siegel
A not-for-profit educational
foundation
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AESTHETIC REALISM FOUNDATION 
