Bruce Bernard was born in 1928. His father Oliver Bernard was a designer and architect, best known for one of the Britain’s principal art deco buildings, the Strand Palace (now demolished, but the grand entrance of which has been preserved for the nation and is on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum). Bernard attended St Martin’s School of Art, where he met many of the artists in the ‘School of London’, among them Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach, with whom he remained friends until the end of his life. After art school, he spent much time in Soho, in the 1950s the most cosmopolitan and lively part of London, frequented by poets, writers and artists, where he met and was befriended by Francis Bacon. He and his two brothers, the poet Oliver Bernard and the writer Jeffrey Bernard, were prominent denizens of literary and artistic London, and between them seemed to encapsulate all that was most stylish about modern London of the day. After becoming Picture Editor of the newly founded Sunday Times Magazine, Bernard went on to produce a series of highly-regarded books on photography. He also curated several major photographic exhibitions for the Barbican Art Gallery and Victoria & Albert Museum, always bringing to them the mark of his distinctive personality: finding and bringing to our attention what is unique and valuable amongst the huge numbers of banal and humdrum images that surround us every day.

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