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 renowned printer and teacher.

 

Richard Benson: North South East West is the artist's first monograph, a collection of 104 color photographs taken over six years on road trips throughout the United States, Bermuda, and eastern Canada. Vivid and full of good humor, Benson's photographs evoke never-ending cycles of creation and destruction while highlighting the unique properties of his prints and exemplifying his innovative techniques for reproducing them for publication. Benson's technical wizardry has yielded unusually vibrant and beguiling color prints that are at once ultra-vivid and utterly natural, like our everyday visual experience. As Peter Galassi, the former Chief Curator of Photography at MoMA, notes in his introduction to the book, Benson's pictures "look the way the world feels." An essay by the artist explains how the prints were made. 128 pp.; 109 illus.