Bruce Bernard was a legendary picture editor. He was first of all a picture researcher for the part-work magazine History of the Twentieth Century, by Purnell. He then became picture researcher for The Sunday Times Magazine followed by picture editor for the Sunday Times Magazine from 1974 to 1981 and was Visual Arts Consultant for The Independent Magazine from 1988-1992. In the intervening years he edited a series of very successful books published by Orbis: The Bible and Its Painters 1983; Vincent by Himself (Van Gogh) 1985; The Impressionist Revolution 1986; The Queen of Heaven 1986. His other books include Photodiscovery 1981 (published by Thames and Hudson); a monograph on Lucian Freud: Lucian Freud 1996 published by Jonathan Cape; Century (published by Phaidon Press 1999).

Bruce Bernard curated, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, an exhibition of the photographer John Deakin: "John Deakin. The Salvage of a Photographer" in 1984. He curated an exhibition "All Human Life: Great Photographs from The Hulton Deutsch Collection" at the Barbican in 1994. He collected (from 1996-99) and curated a collection of 100 photographs for the artist and collector James Moores: The Bruce Bernard Collection. This covered photographs from 1830's to 1999 and was shown at The Victoria and Albert Museum in 2002. A book of the Collection was published by Phaidon Press in 2002.

Over a period of twenty years until he died in 2000 he took photographs. He was a close friend of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff and Howard Hodgkin and an exhibition of a number of these photographs was shown at Tate Britain in 2002. A Hayward touring exhibition "Artists in their Studios" by Bruce Bernard toured around Great Britain from 2002 until early 2006. He also took photographs in India and Morocco.