Photography, Life, and the Opposites

Book excerpt: Photography, Life, and the Opposites is about what makes for beauty not only in the author's chosen art, but in all the arts. And it is about life, and how art can teach us to live it. It is based on this extraordinary principle of Aesthetic Realism stated by its founder, Eli Siegel: "All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves." To illustrate this Len Bernstein has chosen over 70 of his photographs, many of which are in museum collections in the US and abroad, as well as photographs by others. Together with the text, they are a means of asking: What does it mean to have a beautiful way of seeing, a way of seeing that will make us proud? And what stops us from having it?