John Bernhard | |
---|---|
Born | |
Nationality | Swiss |
Known for | Photography, visual arts |
Website | www |
John Bernhard (born May 17, 1957, Geneva, Switzerland) is a Swiss American artist and photographer best known for his surrealist nude studies. Rather than merely showing women's bodies, Bernhard overlaid elements of the earth through projections and worked with myths of metamorphosis as a subtext for his model photography. The resulting images include allusions to the material by which the models are absorbed or into which they disappear.
Bernhard's work was included in the 120 year survey of the nude exhibition "Body Work" at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, alongside the work of Edward Weston, Bill Brandt, Eadweard Muybridge, E. J. Bellocq, and Edward Steichen. Bernhard later continued to devote all his energy taking photographs and bringing them together to enhance their meaning with visual interplay. This is evident in his "Diptychs" and sequencing series "Drift".
His first non-fiction book, America's Call, an engaging road trip memoir, was published in 2011 by Dog Ear Publishing. The French version L'Appel de L'Amérique, illustrated with 57 color photographs and collages, was published in 2013 by Infolio Edition, Switzerland. America's Call is based on the journal that John Bernhard kept, chronicling his trip to North America during the late 1970s. The theme resonates with the book On the Road by Jack Kerouac, and makes you yearn for traveling across a nostalgic time. Houston Chronicle journalist K. Pica Kahn wrote: "Bernhard's way of storytelling takes the audience on the ride of a lifetime with a mélange of experiences like a colorful ribbon in the sky."
He was profiled in the documentary show "Temps Present" on Swiss Television TSR (Switzerland) and the global network TV5 Monde. His work is widely published and exhibited throughout the U.S. and Europe. His photographs are collected by many museums including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Akron Art Museum, Ohio; Denver Art Museum; Musée de l'Élysée, Official site [1] Lausanne, Switzerland; Museet for Fotokunst, Official site Denmark; the New Mexico Museum of Art; Polk Museum of Art, Florida and the Swiss National Library, Bern. His work was shown in 2004 as a major mid-career retrospective exhibition at the Musée des Suisses dans le Monde [2] in Geneva. Since 2014, John Bernhard has served as the publisher and editor-in-chief of ArtHouston magazine. His latest literary venture, Drift of Fate, is his first novel, published by ArtPub and released in 2024. This debut into fiction delves into the profound depths of human existence, exploring themes of love and destiny. John Bernhard lives and works in Houston, Texas.
Work by the artist is held in the public collections of various museums, including: Akron Art Museum, Akron, Ohio; Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas; Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, France; Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City, Mexico; Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado; Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin, Texas; International Cultural Center ICASALS, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, Minnesota; Musée de l'Élysée, Lausanne, Switzerland; Musée des Suisses dans le Monde, Geneva, Switzerland; Musée de la Photographie, Charleroi, Belgium; Brandts Museum of Photographic Art (Museet for Fotokunst), Odensee, Denmark; New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Polk Museum of Art, Lakeland, Florida; Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, Russian Federation; Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona Beach, Florida; Swiss National Library, Bern, Switzerland; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; and The New York Public Library, New York City, New York.
Arno Rafael Minkkinen is a Finnish-American photographer who works in the United States.
Guy Bourdin, was a French artist and fashion photographer known for his highly stylized and provocative images. From 1955, Bourdin worked mostly with Vogue as well as other publications including Harper's Bazaar. He shot ad campaigns for Chanel, Charles Jourdan, Pentax and Bloomingdale's.
John Rivers Coplans was a British artist, art writer, curator, and museum director. A veteran of World War II and a photographer, he emigrated to the United States in 1960 and had many exhibitions in Europe and North America. He was on the founding editorial staff of Artforum from 1962 to 1971, and was Editor-in-Chief from 1972 to 1977.
Malick Sidibé was a Malian photographer from a Fulani village in Soloba, who was noted for his black-and-white studies of popular culture in the 1960s in Bamako. Sidibé had a long and fruitful career as a photographer in Bamako, Mali, and was a well-known figure in his community. In 1994 he had his first exhibition outside of Mali and received much critical praise for his carefully composed portraits. Sidibé's work has since become well known and renowned on a global scale. His work was the subject of a number of publications and exhibited throughout Europe and the United States. In 2007, he received a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale, becoming both the first photographer and the first African so recognized. Other awards he has received include a Hasselblad Award for photography in 2003, an International Center of Photography Infinity Award for Lifetime Achievement (2008), and a World Press Photo award (2010).
The International Museum of Horology, French: Musée international d'horlogerie, is a horological museum in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland. It is owned and operated by the city of La Chaux-de-Fonds.
Clemens Kalischer was an American photojournalist and art photographer. He was born in Germany and immigrated to the United States.
Daniele Buetti is a Swiss visual artist who works in several modes including installation and intervention. The media he works with includes photography, sculpture, drawing, sound, video and digital forms. He is professor at University of Fine Arts Munster where he has taught since 2004. He lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland and Münster, Germany.
Shelby Lee Adams is an American environmental portrait photographer and artist best known for his images of Appalachian family life.
Louis Stettner was an American photographer of the 20th century whose work included streetscapes, portraits and architectural images of New York and Paris. His work has been highly regarded because of its humanity and capturing the life and reality of the people and streets. Starting in 1947, Stettner photographed the changes in the people, culture, and architecture of both cities. He continued to photograph New York and Paris up until his death.
Jan Groover was an American photographer. She received numerous one-person shows, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which holds some of her work in its permanent collection.
Elizabeth Heyert is an American photographer and author. She received her master's degree in photography and the history of photography from the Royal College of Art, London, where she studied with Bill Brandt. She is known for experimental portrait photography, most notably her trilogy The Sleepers (2003), The Travelers (2005), and The Narcissists (2008), and her groundbreaking project The Bound (2016).
Erling Mandelmann was a Danish photographer. He began his career as a freelance photojournalist in the mid-1960s.
Gary Schneider is a South African-born American photographer known for his portraiture and self-portraits. According to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, which awarded him a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013, his "early work in painting, performance, and film remain integral to his explorations of portraiture. He strives to marry art and science, identity and obscurity, figuration and abstraction, the carnal and the spiritual."
Jonathan Anderson & Edwin Low, known as Anderson & Low are fine art photographers who have been collaborating since 1990.
Catherine Leutenegger is a Swiss visual artist and photographer. She has been the recipient of many awards, including the Manor Cultural Prize, the Raymond Weil International Photography Prize and the Swiss Design Awards 2006 and 2008.
Bernhard Schobinger is a Swiss contemporary artist jeweler.
Lucienne Peiry, born in Lausanne on 4 September 1961, holds a doctorate (PhD) in the history of art; she is a specialist in Outsider Art, an exhibition curator, a lecturer and the author of several publications. She gives lectures in both Switzerland and elsewhere in Europe, and has been teaching Outsider Art at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne since 2010. Since 2016, she has also been teaching at the University of Lausanne
Geraldo de Barros was a Brazilian painter and photographer who also worked in engraving, graphic arts, and industrial design. He was a leader of the concrete art movement in Brazil, co-founding Grupo Ruptura and was known for his trailblazing work in experimental abstract photography and modernism. According to The Guardian, De Barros was "one of the most influential Brazilian artists of the 20th century." De Barros is best known for his Fotoformas (1946-1952), a series of photographs that used multiple exposures, rotated images, and abstracted forms to capture a phenomenological experience of Brazil's exponential urbanization in the mid-twentieth century.
Ferenc Berkó was a Hungarian –American photographer noted for his early use of color film.
Luciano Rigolini is a Swiss artist, photographer, bookmaker, producer, and former commissioning editor at Arte in Paris.