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"Occasionally there arises an event or a moment that one knows immediately will forever mark a place in the history of artistic endeavor. Robert Bergman's portraits represent such a moment. In all its burnished majesty his gallery refuses us unearned solace and one by one by one each photograph unveils us, asserting a beauty, a kind of rapture, that is as close as can be to a master template of the singularity, the community, the unextinguishable sacredness of the human race." --Toni Morrison, Winner of the Nobel Prize   For more than ten years, Robert Bergman--a brilliant artist who has purposefully withheld himself from the mainstream--traveled by car with two friends, for months at a time, throughout the Rust Belt (Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Gary) and the East Coast, taking color pictures of everyday people who moved him profoundly. Even as he used a simple 35-mm camera, amateur film, no tripod, and no special lighting, his was a monumental, Whitmanesque project: to document the physical appearance and spirit of Americans, and to gauge the climate of our times. Bergman's first two solo exhibitions were at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and PS1 MOMA.   "An underground legend for decades... A moving body of work, exhibiting an exceptional ability to reveal the singular nature of each of his subjects and their common humanity." --Earl A. Powell, Director, National Gallery of Art   "The portraits... are unlike any others in the history of photography. The faces in Robert Bergman's photographs are all so penetrating that one must spend a good deal of time looking at them to begin to realize their scope. Finally, it is difficult to identify a human emotion that is not revealed in them... Bergman is a great portraitist." --David Levi Strauss, Chair, Graduate Program in Art Writing, School of Visual Arts   "Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Gary Winogrand, and William Eggleston... [Bergman] is certainly in their league." --John Yau, Poet and Critic   "Unprecedented portraits... which transcend boundaries between painting and photography." --Glenn Lowry, Director, The Museum of Modern Art   "We are in the presence of the overwhelmingly human... and there is no escape." --Margo Jefferson, The New York Times