Workshop at Sullivan County Community College

SCCC hosts photo workshop

LOCH SHELDRAKE -- Noted photographer Len Bernstein will be conducting a two-day workshop at Sullivan County Community College titled Photography, Life, and the Opposites. The workshop will be held as a one-credit course on Fridays, June and 8 from 9:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., and as a non-credit continuing education course on Fridays, July 13 and 20 from 9:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Part of the workshop will include taking photographs on campus, so attendees should bring there cameras.

“Every successful photograph,” Bernstein said, “whether it’s a candid or a formal portrait, on the cover of a national magazine or in a family album, has something in common.” The basis of his workshop is the Aesthetic Realism principle stated by Eli Siegel: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

Through studying some of the landmark images in the history of photography, workshop participants will see how a photograph, in its technique and in the emotion evoked, puts opposites together—like the momentary and the permanent, stillness and motion, logic and feeling—and that is what we want to do in our own lives.

Mr. Bernstein is passionate about photography’s ability to convey subtleties of human emotion. “Emotion isn’t just crude, it has shades of light and dark,” he explains, “and these gradations can be found in a beautiful photograph, in the expressions and gestures the photographer captures, as well as in the tonal range of his or her prints.”

Bernstein’s images are in many private and public collections, including The Library of Congress and Bibliothèque nationale de France.

The fee for the credit workshop for New York State residents is $131. The non-credit workshop fee is $60. To register for the credit-bearing workshop, contact 434-5750, ext 4302, or for the non-credit workshop, ext. 4398.