Richard Benson

Richard Benson studied at Brown University. The recorded working language is English. Employment is recorded with Yale University. Work by Richard Benson is recorded in the collections of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, New Mexico Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Smithsonian American Art Museum. Distinctions recorded are Guggenheim Fellowship and MacArthur Fellows Program.

• Name — Richard Mead Atwater Benson • Other Names — Chip (nickname) • Birth Name — Richard Mead Atwater Benson • Born — 8 November 1943 • Birthplace — Newport, Rhode Island, U.S. • Died — 22 June 2017 • Place of death — Providence, Rhode Island, U.S. • Education — Brown University • Occupation — Photographer

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 learned about lenses and optics in his time in the navy. He then worked as a printer, primarily in printing photographs, first in Connecticut and then 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 broad range of interests in the photographic print: aluminum, silver, platinum, palladium, and ink. Working in these different mediums, sometimes learning forgotten crafts and sometimes creating new ones, by the 1970s he was convinced that ink and the modern photo offset press—with its ability to make multiple passes that build an image from multiple layers of ink—possessed a potential for photographic rendition beyond anything else previously known. By the 1990s he began working on the relationship between the computer and traditional photographic imagery, and applied the lessons from this in the production of long-run offset books of work by different 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 with multiple MacArthur fellows.

• 1978: Guggenheim Fellowship, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation • 1981: National Endowment for the Arts Photography Fellowship • 1986: MacArthur Fellowship, MacArthur Foundation • 1986: Guggenheim Fellowship, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation • Two National Endowment for the Arts publication grants, Federal government of the United States • Rhode Island Governor's Medal for the Arts

• Richard Benson Prize, Yale School of Art: annual prize awarded for leadership in the photography program