A Collector: Bruce Berman prefers photographs over paintings

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Show Us Your Walls
By Michael Walker

Bruce Berman at home in Los Angeles, with “North Coast, Gibara, Cuba” (2007). Credit Monica Almeida for The New York Times

LOS ANGELES---There is a photograph taken on the coast of Cuba with the lights of Miami in the distance — what a refugee would see just before setting out. Taken by Virginia Beahan, a large-format photographer, it hangs in the home of Bruce Berman, chairman and chief executive of Village Roadshow Pictures and possibly Hollywood’s most ardent photography collector. Mr. Berman’s collecting aesthetic runs to the unsparing Americana of Walker Evans, William Eggleston and Dorothea Lange, as well as the contemporary acolytes Christian Patterson, Sheron Rupp and Joel Sternfeld, whose haunting photo of a condemned house in the toxic Love Canal neighborhood of Niagara Falls, N.Y., remains a favorite. [More]