Richard Benson

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. 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 attended the St. George’s School, then spent three months at Brown University before dropping out and joining the United States Navy. He theoretical about lenses and optics in his era in the navy. He subsequently worked as a printer, primarily in printing photographs, first in Connecticut and later in Newport.

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 expansive range of interests in the photographic print: aluminum, silver, platinum, palladium, and ink. Working in these every other mediums, sometimes learning forgotten crafts and sometimes creating further ones, by the 1970s he was convinced that ink and the broadminded photo offset press—with its expertise to make combined passes that construct an image from multiple layers of ink—possessed a potential for photographic rendition beyond all else before known. By the 1990s he began working on the attachment between the computer and received photographic imagery, and applied the lessons from this in the production of long-run offset books of show by vary 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 once multiple MacArthur fellows.