Richard Benson: North South East West

Description

Richard Benson, former dean of the Yale School of Art and a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, has been a photographer for more than four decades, but until now his art often took a back seat to his prodigious achievements as a printer and a teacher. This volume presents one hundred photographs by Benson, highlighting the unique properties of his prints and exemplifying his fresh techniques for reproducing them for publication. From direct digital capture through inkjet output, his renowned technical wizardry has yielded unusually vibrant and beguiling colour prints that are at once ultra vivid and utterly natural, like our everyday visual experience. Their uncanny lushness and clarity give voice to Benson's generous, inquisitive eye. An essay by Peter Galassi, Chief Curator of Photography at MoMA, surveys the work, and a text by Benson explains how it was made.

Peter Galassi is Chief Curator of Photography atThe Museum of Modern Art.

The rich and striking photographs here range from Rhode Island seascapes to California mountainscapes. But what's most satisfying on this visual roadtrip is that Mr. Benson, a former dean of the Yale University School of Art and a MacArthur fellow, isn't just seduced by conventional beauties. He unmasks too the primal allure to be found in a pile of gravel and iron gone to rust, in stacks of bricks and in truck tracks stamped into the mud and the muck.--Dana Jennings "The New York Times"