Bruce Bernard, who died in 2000, was a highly respected picture editor and writer of books on photography and painting. He is less well known for his activity as a photographer, and disliked being described as one. In fact, throughout the last twenty years of his life Bernard took photographs and produced a substantial and highly distinctive body of work whose subjects encompass travel, architecture, sculpture and portraits. In May 2002 Tate Britain will be opening an exhibition of Bernard’s photographs of five leading British artists whom he knew; Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Euan Uglow. It is the first to concentrate on Bernard’s photographic portraits.
The exhibition will comprise twenty-four of Bernard’s photographs, including images in black and white and colour. In concentrating on the depiction of these important painters in the setting of their studios, Bernard’s powerful images are fascinating documents in themselves.