Richard Benson: The World Is Smarter Than You Are

Richard Benson (American, 1943–2017) spent much of his life in Newport, Rhode Island, where he grew up among a family of artists. His father, John Howard Benson, was a noted stone carver and calligrapher. As a young man, Richard studied briefly at Brown University and the Art Students League in New York City, and spent three years in the Navy, including study at its Optical Repair School. In 1966 he obtained a job at Meriden Gravure, a printing company in Connecticut that would expose him to the highest levels of craft in printing and set the course for his career in books and photography.

Benson became devoted to the technical aspects of printing and reproducing photographs. He made fine prints for other artists, including Paul Strand and Walker Evans and helped produce many of the finest photography books of his generation, including Lee Friedlander’s American Monument (1976); The Work of Atget (4 vols., 1981–84); and Photographs from the Collection of the Gilman Paper Company (1985). During these years, he quietly pursued his own photography, working with a large camera and producing black-and-white prints in various processes.

In 1979 Benson began teaching at Yale University School of Art, where he eventually served as dean from 1996 to 2006. He mentored younger colleagues and a generation of art students, many of whom recall his teaching as a formative experience. The unique quality of his teaching is reflected in his book The Printed Picture (2008), a survey of the entire history of printing as seen in the teaching materials he assembled over forty years.

In the 1990s Benson embraced digital photography and dove into color. He experimented with inkjet printing and traveled broadly to make photographs, many of which were published in North South East West (2011), a collection of his pictures from the previous six years.

Benson’s work is represented in many collections including the Eakins Press Foundation, the Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Yale University Art Gallery.