It’s a world in which the sense of motion is filled with emotion, a world in which “a beautiful photograph makes one of opposites.”

At the age of 24, Bernstein seriously picked up a camera in New York City. About a year later he had a chance encounter with a photographer who studied at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in the Big Apple and soon found what he was searching for: a direction for his personal photographic vision.

“I felt I [had] found a way of expressing myself that the meaning was so deep inside me that I wanted to do it for the rest of my life,” he recalled.

“Walking with my camera, the city streets seemed transformed - friendlier and more interesting - and I spent hours searching for dramatic situations, trying to capture the right moment.

“Looking through the viewfinder, what I saw had new value for me, boredom and loneliness seemed to vanish, and I wished I could feel that way all the time….Hoping to learn what made a photograph successful, I avidly studied the history and technique of photography.”

In talking with the noted photographer, his art and the teachings of philosopher/critic Eli Siegel (1902-1978) constantly merge as Bernstein mixes what he feels is a guiding light with technical explorations of what make his black & white photos seem to leap from the frames.

Siegel founded Aesthetic Realism in 1941. In his book “Self and World: An Explanation of Aesthetic Realism,” Siegel said, “Aesthetic Realism states that ethics begins with the human obligation to see everything, living and not living, as well as one can….Where we get away from this obligation or don’t see it, or diminish its meaning, it is rather clear that contempt is showing its strength--indeed [it] is winning.”

According to Bernstein, he gained inspiration from Siegel’s statement, “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

Today, Len Bernstein walks the local streets of Sullivan County and Manhattan with his camera freeze-framing the world around him in thoughtful, moving compositions that reveal the humanity and emotion of varied subjects: a baby sitting on a sidewalk beneath a chalkboard window sign reading “To Go”; a child bathed in light; an inquisitive city-dwelling dog making eye contact with the photographer from a second floor apartment across the street; and an old man feeding pigeons next to two starkly illuminated stone slab war memorials, engraved with names of the nation’s war dead.

“People need to be able to look into a person’s face and see that person has depths and hopes,” said Bernstein of his candid portraits.

He said there is “no greater pleasure or honor…than being true to ourselves” in the way a photographer approaches and ultimately captures the subject at hand.

“Along with the cinema, photography is perhaps the newest art form,” added Bernstein. “It has the most to do with technical matters--optics and chemistry….A person can use a mechanical device to express deep emotion about the world.”

Bernstein described the camera as a way of using “impersonal machinery to express deep emotions.”

In 1984, he traveled to Washington, D.C. to document the 20th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have A Dream” speech.

Before Bernstein departed to join a crowd of 500,000 in the nation’s capital, one of his photography teachers at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation gave him a few words of advice.

“Nancy Starrels told me to think about what people were hoping and longing for that day and how to capture that image,” he said, adding he took a course from Starrels titled “The Honoring Eye.”

“It was an extraordinary march,” Bernstein recollected.  “It was black, it was white…it was poor, middle class and wealthy…it was a stirring diversity of people.”

Bernstein was born in Brooklyn in 1950, and some of his earliest memories of childhood involve looking through boxes of photographic negatives recorded by his father with a Kodak Brownie camera.

On Friday, December 27, Bernstein discussed his work at the first “Meet the Artist” series presented at the Peez Leweez coffeehouse in Livingston Manor.

His exhibition of black & white photographs will be on display through the end of the month. For information, call Peez Leweez at 439-3300.

“As a photographer, when you look through a viewfinder into a person’s face, you see light and dark as the light and dark in their personality,” he said. “It’s a composition before your eyes…the way they can be thoughtful and recessive.

“People have depths and mystery,” said Bernstein. “I still find photography a thing of mystery.”