Michael Berns Photographer

Illuminated Shadows – 1-29-2026 (Final)

“In photography there are no shadows that cannot be illuminated.”
— August Sander

“Light glorifies everything. It transforms and ennobles the most commonplace and ordinary subjects.
The object is nothing, light is everything.”
— Leonard Missone

“I often think of what I photograph as a soap opera, where I am waiting for the right cast to fall into place.”
— Elliott Erwitt

Shakespeare wrote in Act 2, Scene 7, Line 139 of his play As You Like It:

“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.”

For me, photography is the chance to pull images off of that stage
into my magical box—

images that I attempt to freeze as fragments of the
human drama,

images that somehow seem to have always existed in my machine,
waiting to be discovered.

And finally, be it known that:

“The Bard does of course abide.”

Finding Forrester, a film directed by Gus Van Sant, is about a fictional award-winning writer, William Forrester, in which mentorship is one of the major themes.
Forrester is a J.D. Salinger–like character who, starting with his words, helps a bright high-school student find his own path as a creative writer.

The following quotes are from photographers whose words and images helped me as I searched for my own voice when I began to make photographs.

Their understanding of photography meshed with the aesthetic principles I was adopting.
Learning from past photographers became a starting point for the development of my own personal path into image-making.

“Position is where everything happens from.”
— Frederick Sommer

“Everything is a subject. Every subject has a rhythm. To feel it is the raison d’être.
The photograph is a fixed moment of such a raison d’être, which lived on in itself.”
— André Kertész

“The secret of photography is the camera takes on the character and personality of the handler.”
— Walker Evans

“For me the camera is a sketchbook, the master of the instant — which in visual terms —
questions and decides simultaneously.”
— Henri Cartier-Bresson

“It’s not the decisive moment. It’s not the beginning or end.
It’s the middle. It’s more like a question.”
— Robert Frank

“Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame.
When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts.”
— Garry Winogrand

“I never think of an image in its various parts but always in its entirety.”
— Lee Friedlander

“The camera is not merely a reflecting pool and photographs are not exactly the mirror, mirror on the wall that speaks with a twisted tongue.
Witness is borne and puzzles come together at the photographic moment, which is very simple and complete.
The mind-finger presses the release on the silly machine and it stops time and holds what its jaws can encompass and the light will stain.”
— Lee Friedlander

“Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.”
— Diane Arbus

“If you were to ask me to define a photograph in a few words, I would say it is a fossil of light and time.”
— Daidō Moriyama

“Photography is the art of observation. It has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.”
— Elliott Erwitt

“I love mistakes in photography. Sometimes they work.”
— Robert Frank

Jack Kerouac’s foreword to Robert Frank’s book The Americans describes one person’s takeaway from a series of images made by a friend:

“Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand,
he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the poets of the world.
To Robert Frank I now give this message: You got eyes.”

“You got eyes.”
Perhaps the simplest and purest compliment that a photographer — or any artist — can have.

Michael Berns

mikeberns10 — Instagram
mikeberns10@gmail.com