Robert Bergman (American, b. 1944)

Robert Bergman was born in 1944, in New Orleans; his father was a doctor and his mother a local Shakespearean actress. Following his father's death, his mother moved to Minneapolis with Robert and his brother. Bergman took his first pictures at the age of six and was taught how to develop film and print by his cousin. Whilst studying at the University of Minnesota, Bergman befriended Danny Seymour and together they dropped out of college (three credits short of a degree) to become "great geniuses". The two friends took photographs in the streets at night and worked in a makeshift darkroom in Bergman's mother's laundry room. Since the mid-1980s, Bergman has been photographing with his 35mm camera on the streets of Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and New York. Strongly influenced by Robert Frank's seminal work The Americans, Bergman's work merges the traditions of classical portraiture with documentary photography.

Bergman's first monograph "A Kind of Rapture" was published in 1998 with an introduction by Toni Morrison and an afterword by Meyer Shapiro. His first solo exhibition "Robert Bergman: Portraits, 1986-1995", was held in 2009 at the National Gallery, Washington DC, followed a month later by a retrospective at MoMA PS1. 

Image on the right: Self-portrait, ©Robert Bergman.