Richard Lerner
Throughout his life, anthropologist Richard Neil Lerner (b. 1939) has been a dedicated photographer of the human condition. At the age of ten, he received his first camera, assisting his photojournalist father in the darkroom. During college, Lerner was active in the Documentary Film Society.
After earning a bachelor's (1960) and master's degrees (1962) from the University of Wisconsin, Richard Lerner taught for three years at the SUNY at Buffalo. Enrolling in the anthropology program at UC Berkeley, he traveled to India between June, 1968 and May, 1970. Here he carried out dissertation research on cooperative and collective farming in Uttar Pradesh. At the same time, he made a collection for the Hearst (then Lowie) Museum of Anthropology. Lerner obtained his doctorate in 1975. During 1988-89, he returned to India as a Fulbright Visiting Lecturer in environmental anthropology, revisiting and rephotographing one of the cooperative farms he had studied earlier.
In addition to portraits, Richard Lerner's photographic subjects in India included scenes of urban and village daily life, crafts, shops and merchants, ceremonies, dance and music, religious sculpture and architecture, archaeological sites, and landscapes. As a humanist, he believed in capturing candid images of people in their daily lives; as a materialist, he was interested in the objects that surrounded them: "I've always been interested in how things look, and the physical manifestations of life. And photography is the primary means of recording that." Another of his motivations was to offer photos as gifts for his consultants, since photographers were rare in villages. Lerner usually waited to take pictures until after he had become familiar with the people and sites, and he obtained permission from his subjects.
In 1974, Lerner was hired as an anthropologist by the federal Corps of Engineers, based in San Francisco. Here he performed environmental assessments and investigated the social impacts of federal water projects, especially among the Pomo and other Native Californian peoples. Among his specialties were historical archaeology and ethnobotany. Richard Lerner, who retired in early 1998, resides in Berkeley.
Richard Lerner with a group of cooperative farmers, Kerala
Photograph by James Lerner; December, 1968.
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