“For a photographer to make her mark today as an artist, her work must resonate with something that marks it as her own otherwise it is simply a photograph. You see that in the works of masters. Cartier-Bresson, Ralph Gibson, Mary Ellen Mark and Desiree Dolron can be recognized without glancing for a signature. Berman’s work resonates with its uniqueness. She takes the quotidian and makes it special.”
Ray Merritt, writer and curator
“When I first saw Fern Berman’s photographs a couple of decades ago, I was struck by the intensity of ordered sensuality. Today, I find them ever more astonishing as her aesthetic vision has evolved, playing with the differences of surface and depth, sometimes focusing on a richly sculptured wall, sometimes bursting in Kandinsky abstractions of line and color. She keeps exploding the possibilities of what film can do even as a photographic medium, is disappearing. Through the quality of her art, she is preventing the use of film from being a wholly lost art.”
Betty Fussell, writer
“Most of us can see, but how many of us can see? More to the point, can we observe life in all of its richness, detail and mystery even though it is right in front of us all the time? That seems to be the special province of artists and poets, who remind us how vibrant, beautiful yet transient is our world even when things seem dire. Such a poetic artist and observer is Fern Berman, whose photographs are both worlds unto themselves and fascinating details of the world we share. Her mastery of color and composition, while extraordinary, are only tools that enable her to create these worlds on paper. Fern Berman’s photographs have the exhilarating effect of making us see in ways we had never done before.”
Fred Plotkin, author and pleasure activist