Bruce Bernard was an English picture editor, writer and photographer.
Background
Mr. Bernard was born in London, United Kingdom, on March 21, 1928. He was the middle of three sons to the English architect Oliver Percy Bernard and his opera singer wife Dora Hodges (d. 1950), who performed under the name of Fedora Roselli. His siblings were the poet Oliver Bernard, and the columnist Jeffrey Bernard. Through his paternal ancestry, Bernard was a third cousin to the actor Stanley Holloway (Bernard's grandfather Charles (d.1894) was a brother to Holloway's maternal grandmother). Owing to this, he was distantly related to Holloway's son, the actor Julian Holloway and Julian's daughter, the author and former model, Sophie Dahl.
Education
Bruce Bernard had brief spells at a number of boarding schools, eventually finishing at Bedales School. From there he attended, albeit briefly, St Martin's School of Art, before falling into a number of menial jobs within London's Soho.
Career
He became a picture editor for History Of the 20th Century in 1968 before moving to the Sunday Times's magazine as a picture researcher in 1972; he later became the paper's picture editor, a post he held until 1980. It was during this time that Mr. Bernard produced Photodiscovery: Masterworks of Photography 1840-1940, which became his most successful work.
Bruce Bernard left the Sunday Times and joined The Independent where he wrote for the paper's magazine. He wrote Vincent By Himself, about the painter Vincent Van Gogh. He also frequently wrote short articles under pseudonyms, including Joe Hodges and Deirdre Pugh, for the Independent.
In 1994 Bernard curated a photographic exhibition for the Barbican Centre gallery. His portraits included those of Leigh Bowery, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, and Euan Uglow. In 1999 he put the finishing touches to the Bruce Bernard Photography Collection for the James Moores Foundation.
The Victoria and Albert Museum held an exhibition of 100 photographs chosen by Bruce Bernard.
Mr. Bernard succumbed to cancer in 2000.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Writing for The Independent, the columnist Adrian Searle commented: "[Bernard] had a shrewd, passionate eye, and was possessed of one of the most acute bullshit detectors I have ever encountered."
The photographer John Riddy opined that "Bernard's portraits of British artists are the only one's [sic] to escape cliché."
In the photographer's obituary, Searle remarked: "[Bernard's] sense of what was good and bad art, good and bad photography had an almost moral dimension, but one which was entirely personal, and thoroughly ethical."