HARRY BENSON’S FIFTY YEARS OF PHOTO JOURNALISM

Friday, 24 November 2006 20:45

Edinburgh, Scotland - The Scottish National Portrait Gallery exhibits Harry Benson's "Being There ".  He has photographed every US president since Eisenhower, was just feet away from Bobby Kennedy the night he was shot and in the room with Richard Nixon when he resigned.  He was next to Coretta Scott King at her husband’s funeral and round the corner from the Twin Towers when the first plane hit on September 11.  Harry Benson, the renowned photojournalist, has a knack of being in the right place at the right time – a skill that has endured for the past fifty years.  Being There: Harry Benson’s Fifty Years of Photojournalism, a major retrospective at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh , draws together over one hundred of Benson’s most iconic images, together with work that is rarely seen and little known.  The exhibition, curated by Roger Hargreaves, is the first exhibition of Harry’s work in the UK and will be the only UK showing.  On exhibition until 7 January 2007.

Some of the highlights of the show include the legendary shot of the Beatles arriving at JFK airport in 1964, which was taken on their first trip to the US.  Other famous images include the Reagans dancing at the White House; a portrait of Michael Jackson framed by two child mannequins at his bedroom door and a moving portrait of Peg Ogonowski, the wife of the captain of American Airlines flight 11, the first plane to strike the Twin Towers.

Born in Glasgow, Harry Benson started out as a wedding photographer, photographing wedding parties in the morning before developing the pictures in his garden shed in time for the receptions in the afternoon.  He quickly moved on to the Hamilton Advertiser before honing his native charm and guile in the competitive world of Fleet Street newspapers; working first for the Daily Sketch, then the Daily Express.  He moved from there to LIFE Magazine and Vanity Fair.  He developed a forensic eye for creating memorable pictures of the defining personalities and events of the moment.  Soon after his first arrival in New York on the flight that brought the Beatles to America he became resident in the United States, where he has lived and worked ever since.  A pivotal aspect of the exhibition will be the image of America, during the upheavals and traumas of the 1960s, that he sent back to newspapers in Britain.  This will include images of British personalities resident and visiting America, grappling with an unfamiliar culture typified by the Archbishop of Canterbury giving a talk in Las Vegas and John Lennon confronting the spectacular backfiring of his quip that the Beatles were ‘more popular than Jesus’.

Renowned amongst his peers for his stealth, Benson moved almost invisibly around the parties and offices of the great and the good.  Sir Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook’s son, was so impressed at Benson’s unobtrusiveness at a party he had thrown he suggested Benson work for his father’s paper, the Daily Express.  It is Harry’s discretion and ability to go unnoticed that has seen him invited in and invited back by everyone who has met and worked with him - from President Reagan to Elizabeth Taylor.

However, for all his charm and wit, Benson is nobody’s fool.  Determined not to be outdone, Benson once retagged the luggage of three competitors at an airport check-in desk ensuring their film made a detour home via Rio.  This was their comeuppance for plotting to drop him off a party guest list for an event he was due to photograph.  Sprinkled throughout the exhibition will be flashes of Harry Benson’s irreverent humor as familiar personalities find themselves caught on camera in unfamiliar moments of revelation.

It hasn’t all been parties and celebrity, however: Benson has photographed most of the defining moments in recent political history.  He photographed the fall of Czechoslovakia and the communist regime in Romania.  He was present at both the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall and covered the I.R.A. hunger strikes, as well as terrorism in Kuwait, Israel and the West Bank and conflicts in Bosnia, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

In 1983, during the height of the Afghan war with Russia, Benson was commissioned by LIFE Magazine to get the first US pictures of Soviet combatants in POW camps in Afghanistan.  From his base in Pakistan, Benson acquired traditional Afghan garb and drove, undetected, for two days in a beaten-up Jeep across the border and into the heart of war-torn Afghanistan.  His guile paid off and he made it to the mountain camp which was being guarded by the Mujahideen.  It wasn’t easy to persuade the young Russian POW’s to be photographed, but his Russian interpreter explained to them that the Swiss Red Cross would see the photographs and help them stay alive.  Slowly they came out one by one and Harry got his story.

Commenting on his career and the Portrait Gallery exhibition, Benson said: “When I started out, not in my wildest dreams did I ever think that my photographs would be shown in the most prestigious gallery in Scotland.  All I was thinking about was having a job at the end of the week.  I still cannot believe the camera - that magical piece of technology - has taken me around the world for almost fifty years.  What am I proud of most?  There are a few things but, covering the American Civil Rights movement and marching with Martin Luther King Jr. in the South, is certainly up there at the top.  I'm glad my wife, Gigi, and my daughters, Wendy and Tessa, will share this time with me, but I would have liked my mother to have seen this as well.  Being in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery is the ultimate honor.”

Harry Benson has twice won the prestigious National Press Photographer Association’s Magazine Photographer of the Year award, first in 1981 and then in 1985.  He has also been awarded the 2005 LUCIE Award for Lifetime Achievement in Portrait Photography and the 2005 American Photo Award for Photography.  Harry has had forty one-man exhibitions of his work in the US and has some of his work in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC.  He has published nine books and is currently working on four new titles.  The exhibition will tour to the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington in 2007.

Visit : www.nationalgalleries.org/benson