Richard Benson (photographer)


Richard Mead Atwater Benson 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. His work is held in the collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art.

Biography

Born in Newport, Rhode Island, Benson began teaching photography at Yale University 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—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, 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

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