Richard Mead Atwater Benson (November 8, 1943 – June 22, 2017) was an American photographer, printer, and educator who used photographic processing techniques of the past and present. "He is perhaps best known for his innovations in photographic offset printing techniques and, later, ink-jet printing." Benson was awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships and a

MacArthur Fellowship The MacArthur Fellows Program, also known as the MacArthur Fellowship and commonly but unofficially known as the "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation typically to between 20 and 30 indi ...

. His work is held in the collections of

Los Angeles County Museum of Art The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. LACMA is on Museum Row, adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits (George C. Page Museum). LACMA was founded in 19 ...

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern and contemporary art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art, and wa ...

and

Whitney Museum of American Art The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–194 ...

Biography

Born in Newport, Rhode Island, Benson attended the St. George's School, then spent three months at Brown University before dropping out and joining the

United States Navy The United States Navy (USN) is the maritime service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. It is the largest and most powerful navy in the world, with the estimated tonnage ...

. He learned about lenses and optics in his time in the navy. He then worked as a printer, primarily in printing photographs, first in

Connecticut Connecticut () is the southernmost state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, New York to the west, and Long Island Sound to the south. Its capita ...

and then in Newport. Benson began teaching photography at

Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Sta ...

in 1979 and was dean of the Yale School of Art from 1996 to 2006. Benson had a broad range of interests in the photographic print: aluminum, silver, platinum, palladium, and ink. Working in these different mediums, sometimes learning forgotten crafts and sometimes creating new ones, by the 1970s he was convinced that ink and the modern photo

offset press Offset printing is a common printing technique in which the inked image is transferred (or "offset") from a plate to a rubber blanket and then to the printing surface. When used in combination with the lithographic process, which is based on ...

—with its ability to make multiple passes that build an image from multiple layers of ink—possessed a potential for photographic rendition beyond anything else previously known. By the 1990s he began working on the relationship between the computer and traditional photographic imagery, and applied the lessons from this in the production of long-run offset books of work by different photographers, in both black and white and color. He was the uncle of stone carver

Nicholas Benson Nicholas Waite "Nick" Benson (born August 19, 1964) is a third generation American stone carver, stone letterer and owner of The John Stevens Shop in Newport, Rhode Island. He was named a 2010 MacArthur Fellow. Early life Nick Benson began work ...

, the owner of The John Stevens Shop. Nick Benson was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2010, making the Bensons one of two families with multiple MacArthur fellows.

Publications

*''Lay This Laurel.''

Eakins Eakins is an English surname. People with this name include: *Dallas Eakins (born 1967), Canadian ice hockey defenseman and head coach * Jim Eakins (born 1946), American basketball player * John Eakins (1923/4–1998), Canadian politician * Peter ...

, 1973. Co-authored with Lincoln Kirstein. . *''Photographs from the Collection of the Gilman Paper Company.'' White Oak, 1985. . With acknowledgements by

Howard Gilman Howard Gilman (February 15, 1924 – January 3, 1998) was descendant of Isaac Gilman, who had founded the Gilman Paper Company in 1884. Biography Gilman was born and raised on Manhattan's Upper East Side. He attended Horace Mann School in the ...

, an introduction by Pierre Apraxine, notes to the plates by Lee Marks and an afterword by Benson. Benson made multiple halftone films from each photograph, exposed those films to plates, and printed the plates on a single-color sheet-fed offset printing press. *''A Maritime Album: 100 Photographs and Their Stories.'' Newport News, Virginia:

Mariners' Museum The Mariners' Museum and Park is located in Newport News, Virginia, United States. Designated as America’s ''National Maritime Museum'' by Congress, it is one of the largest maritime museums in North America. The Mariners' Museum Library, cont ...

; Yale University Press, 1997. Co-authored with

John Szarkowski Thaddeus John Szarkowski (December 18, 1925 – July 7, 2007) was an American photographer, curator, historian, and critic. From 1962 to 1991 Szarkowski was the director of photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Early life and ca ...

. . *''A Yale Album: The Third Century.'' A Yale Tercentennial Book. Yale University Press, 2001. . *''The Printed Picture.''

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of ...

, 2008. . Exhibition catalog of an eponymous 2016 exhibition at MoMA, co-curated with

Peter Galassi Peter Johnston Galassi (born April 18, 1951) is an American writer, curator, and art historian working in the field of photography. His principal fields are photography and nineteenth-century French art. Education Galassi graduated from Phillip ...

Awards

Honors and awards given to him

*1978: Guggenheim Fellowship, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation *1981:

National Endowment for the Arts The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal ...

Photography Fellowship *1986:

MacArthur Foundation The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is a private foundation that makes grants and impact investments to support non-profit organizations in approximately 50 countries around the world. It has an endowment of $7.0 billion and p ...

*1986: Guggenheim Fellowship, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation *Two National Endowment for the Arts publication grants,

Federal government of the United States The federal government of the United States (U.S. federal government or U.S. government) is the national government of the United States, a federal republic located primarily in North America, composed of 50 states, a city within a fe ...

*Rhode Island Governor's Medal for the Arts

Honors and awards in honor of him

*Richard Benson Prize,

Yale School of Art The Yale School of Art is the art school of Yale University. Founded in 1869 as the first professional fine arts school in the United States, it grants Masters of Fine Arts degrees to students completing a two-year course in graphic design, painti ...

: annual prize awarded for leadership in the photography program

Collections

Benson's work is held in the following permanent collections: *

, Los Angeles, CA: 3 prints (as of March 2019) *

, New York: 70 prints (as of March 2019) *

, New York: 21 prints (as of March 2019) *

, San Francisco, CA: 11 prints (as of March 2019) *

, New York: 8 prints (as of March 2019)

References

External links

"A Single Person Making A Single Thing"
Calvin Tomkins, Profiles, ''The New Yorker,'' 1990
"Richard Benson"
''View Camera'', 1997
"Richard Benson"
Pace/MacGill Gallery

2008
Richard Benson Lectures
at Yale {{DEFAULTSORT:Benson, Richard 1943 births 2017 deaths 20th-century American photographers 21st-century American photographers Artists from Newport, Rhode Island Brown University alumni Photographers from Rhode Island St. George's School (Rhode Island) alumni Yale University faculty