This article is more than 23 years oldObituaryBruce Bernard
This article is more than 23 years oldPicture editor and writer whose passionate eye honed a sharp response to the images of a centuryBruce Bernard, who has died aged 72, was an alarming, angry, affectionate and singular man. Picture editor, photographer and writer, he was one of three brothers and two sisters; his younger, self-destructive brother Jeffrey was the author of the infamous Low Life column in the Spectator, and the subject of Keith Waterhouse's play Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell, while his elder sibling, Oliver, is a poet, translator of Rimbaud and Apollinaire, and veteran campaigner against the siting of nuclear weapons in East Anglia.
Bruce may have been a stalwart of a dying bohemia, but he achieved far more than he squandered in Soho's white nights and black afternoons.
His father was an interior designer and scenic designer for opera, who survived the sinking of the torpedoed Lusitania in 1915. His mother was a singer. Bruce was shunted around a number of boarding schools, finishing his education at Bedales. Somewhere on the way, aged about 14, he first met Lucian Freud, who became a life-long friend.
He went on to St Martin's School of Art, but left, drifting round the corner to Soho, in the 1950s the most cosmopolitan and lively part of London. He worked as a scene-shifter and in sporadic white-collar jobs, but most of all he found his milieu among artists and writers, meeting Francis Bacon for the first time in 1949.
He went on, by a devious, accidental route, to become picture editor for a part-work, the History Of the 20th Century, for Purnell. He moved to the Sunday Times magazine as picture researcher in 1972, soon becoming picture editor, a post he held until 1980. Here, he produced Photodiscovery, a personal history of the photograph, which became a much-sought-after book.
His eye for photographs, and his belief that the photographic image was at least the equal of the paintings he admired, led him to have the best, and most analytic, response to photography I have encountered.
He had a shrewd, passsionate eye, and was possessed of one of the most acute bullshit detectors I have ever encountered. For a long time, I was a bit afraid of him. In the early 1980s, we lived in the same house beside the British Museum, and at first I was more aware of the sounds of nightly pacing, and Beethoven booming through the floorboards, than of the near-invisible Bruce.
One night I ended up in his room, filled with photographs, Lucian Freud etchings and piles of books. We'd drink, and he'd stand in the centre of the room, arms to his side - just as Freud has him in his later portraits - Britten and Pears's setting of William Blake's Rose Thou Art Sick booming round the room.
Having left the Sunday Times, Bernard went on to be picture editor for the Independent magazine, then in its heyday, and worked on a marvellous book about Van Gogh, Vincent By Himself, which juxtaposed Van Gogh's paintings and drawings with excerpts from the letters to Theo Van Gogh, and a book about paintings of the Virgin Mary. His short articles (often produced pseudonymously - Joe Hodges and Deirdre Pugh being favourite monikers) were terse, unaffected by art or photography jargon and, in the manner of the painters he admired, hard-won.
He travelled, he disappeared to his studio (from whence, no paintings or drawings ever emerged), he continued to drink in Soho and to chronicle, in photography, the life about him - and, in particular, his friendships with Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews and Freud, with whom he sometimes used to breakfast at the Savoy. Yet it would be a mistake to see Bernard as a figure whose life was bounded by Soho. I discovered he was a great friend both of Don McCullin, and also of Robert Mapplethorpe. His curiosity about images, whatever their source, whatever their medium, was voracious, critical and driven by a passionate understanding of their power.
Bernard was sometimes depicted, in Michael Heath's hilarious and bitter Private Eye cartoon chronicle of Soho barflies, the Regulars, as Napoleon. He could be dismissive, curmudgeonly, not so much difficult as impossible. At the same time, his silent presence could be immensely reassuring in times of difficulty, and his enthusiasm for what he believed in was truly infectious. He had huge fallings-out - notably with Francis Bacon, about whom Bruce was making a book shortly before the artist's death. Suddenly, for no good reason, Bacon pulled the plug. He also fell out with his brother, Jeffrey; it was a continuing theme of their relationship.
As well as compiling the definitive survey of the work of George Rodger, co-founder of Magnum, and curating an exhibition of the work of photographer John Deakin for the Victoria and Albert Museum, Bernard went on to curate a photographic exhibition for the Barbican gallery in 1994 and to show his own photographs. His portraits of Leigh Bowery and Lucian Freud (about whom he produced an excellent, image-based monograph), Francis Bacon in the studio doorway, Euan Uglow trapped by the string sight-lines which measure the space of his studio, are incredibly powerful. The photographer John Riddy says that, for him, Bernard's portraits of British artists are the only one's to escape cliché.
Bernard captured not just famous men, but also their self images, their anxious presences. Last year, while he was still actively engaged in compiling the Bruce Bernard Photography Collection for the James Moores Foundation, he had a great success with Century, a huge compilation of photographs published by Phaidon, featuring 10 images a year for 100 years. It is a definitive and endlessly fascinating pictorial account of the past hundred years. Right to the end, Bernard continued to work.
I last saw him, with his companion, the artist Virginia Verran, two weeks ago, as they were returning from photographing Leon Kossoff. Ill with cancer, looking like a frail, plucked bird, he never lost his enthusiasm for life or his compulsive fascination for images. His 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.
Bruce Bernard, picture editor and photographer, born March 21 1928; died March 29 2000
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