Excerpts from selected REVIEWS: 

“Some photographers come freighted-simultaneously blessed and cursed – with a tireless, omnivorous eye. Lee Friedlander is such a photographer. So were Henri Cartier-Bresson and Andre Kertesz. Toronto photographer Phil Bergerson has an eye like theirs.

Like them, Bergerson’s eye is quick, endlessly engaged and, in a sense, lidles – condemned to an ongoing bedazzlement in the face of the small ironic moments that bestow a sort of indexical meaning on a world that usually comes on, for most of us, as jumbled and chaotic.

…Bergerson zeroes in on the ideological contradictions and idealistic failures everywhere inherent in the small towns of North America. Moments most of us might miss seem to spring out at the photographer and take over.”

Gary Michael Dault, The Globe and Mail

“A fond neighbour’s view
Phil Bergerson photographs America – its roadside attractions, its signage, its oddities, its peculiar juxtapositions… Bergerson’s photos are straight narrative realism, astute and fond portrayals of the foibles of Americans. The signs we put up and the little landmarks we erect reveal an innocent and endearing humanity in a country that some perceive as the most powerful and arrogant in the world… For all the sweetness of these images, a dark thread courses through them…In Bergerson’s America, much is broken and useless, but hope marches on.”

Cate McQuaid ,The Boston Globe

“Like stills from a road movie, Phil Bergerson’s photos construct a visual grammar that is antiglamorous. They capture the most quirky emblems of the monumental American vernacular. Decaying icons, grievous anxieties, meditations on inevitability of chaos, these parched, pale and bleeding colour images are humorous, poignant, and celebratory all at once. The subject lies within the frames of the ghosts of the by-ways and the eccentricities of modern America’s lumpen-Quixotic heartland and imperial bravado set against red clay earth and sadness, silent towns in the throes of de-industrialization, dripping with emptiness and disenfranchisement.

Robert Kenter, Lola Magazine

“The artist strives to understand the way in which individuals either represent themselves, or speak through signs in order to communicate to one another. Often, as illustrated by Bergerson, “the display-maker, sign-maker or object-maker produces his presentations without knowing the ironic or ambiguous nature of what he presents.” [Bergerson’s] attempts to make sense of these “mixed messages” by piecing together the shards of information he has accumulated throughout his search, first within the structure of a single image, then within the entire sequence of images. The result has produced pictures full of “metaphorical possibilities,” pictures that reflect both Bergerson’s “wonder and enthusiasm for exploration and discovery.”

Karen Kasner, Gallery Magazine

Continuing the work of a decade spent photographing contemporary culture in decline…Phil Bergerson turned his photo-anthropological attentions to the “other Bermuda.” Here, literally burrowing beneath what he term’s the island’s very private, subtle and restrictive cultural past, excavating abandoned dwellings and roaming in graveyards and museums, he has managed to create a highly poetic and often disturbing pageant-like photo-sequence. In Bermuda Sightings, a mouldering children’s book rests on a rotting table (Time for Rhyme), a barbershop chart of “NY Styles” for black men is pinned next to photos of white-trousered cricket teams and a dusty, ravaged telephone hangs useless from its cord, against a distressed wall. Huge whitened tombstones shoulder up to the viewer, blocking out everything else. It’s weird, disorienting, and, in Bergerson’s skillful hands, a brilliant new and very peculiar world of colonial ghost stories.”

Gary Michael Dault, The Globe and Mail

“Phil Bergerson’s findings are no less paradoxical, though funnier as he excavates the psyche of North American popular culture. Found irony and Bergerson’s self-deprecating humour are brilliantly combined in a furniture store window display offering two levels of salvation: The Last Supper and a quick cash loan. Both seem mighty appealing to the travelling photographer whose reflection floats above the central figure of Christ. The maker and the Maker share tripod legs and the gleaming white socks.”

Martha Langford, The Power of Reflection