Note: for biographical information about Len Bernstein, including his study in professional classes taught by Ellen Reiss, Chairman of Aesthetic Realism, click on this link. To learn more about Aesthetic Realism consultations, click here.

For many years, my father and I couldn't be in the same room without getting into an argument. When I began to photograph, I got more interested in people but, full of conceit, I saw myself as a seeker of truth with the camera while hardly wanting to know my father. There was a great deal to respect him for, including the fact that he fought against fascism in Spain as a member of the Lincoln Brigade. But ignorant and cruel, like many sons, I didn't consider him a worthy subject. I remember a day in 1976 when Milton Bernstein and I spent 12 hours together, not fighting, and amazingly having a good time with each other.  I had been studying Aesthetic Realism for just a few months, my father had noticed a change in me from our phone conversations, and he came to visit. At the end of that day he said to me that, at last, he felt like he had his son back. He told me how grateful he was to Eli Siegel for making this possible and, at the age of 66, began to study Aesthetic Realism for himself. I'll never forget how he looked after his first Aesthetic Realism consultation—like a man who had seen the sun rise for the first time. In 1984, my father became ill with Lou Gehrig's disease. He knew he was dying, and I didn't know how to be with him. Seeing my distress, Ellen Reiss asked me questions in an Aesthetic Realism class that had such a good effect on me, including, "Does your father feel you want to know all his feelings, or are you afraid to?" And she explained, "It would be good if he could feel there was at least one person who wasn't afraid to hear all his thoughts."  I told my dad what I was learning and we got a chance to say things to each other in the final months of his life that, without Ms. Reiss's good will, would never have been expressed. Here is one of the last portraits I took of him. His countenance is tough, critical. I see resentment at his coming death. I resented it. But with the tilt of his head and creased brow, he also looks thoughtful, as if asking, "Why?" He has universal qualities of the earth he would soon return to—hardness and softness; qualities present in the soft, out-of-focus stone background with its horizonal line passing through him, extending his relation to all we cannot see.