More on Beatles photographer, Sir Harry Benson

In my last post, I mentioned a photojournalist by the name of Harry Benson. I hope that’s a name that’s familiar to you. He has judged the Camera USA National Photography Competition for the Naples Art Association three times. I point that out because it illustrates the strides we have taken culturally here in Southwest Florida. People don’t just come here for balmy skies and sandy beaches. People visit us here in Matlacha Island, Sanibel, Fort Myers and Naples for art, for culture and for our theatrical and musical productions!

Let me tell you just how accomplished a photographer Harry Benson is. As I said in my last post, he shadowed the Beatles on their inaugural tour of the United States in 1964. But on top of that, he has photographed every U.S. president from Eisenhower on; was just feet away from Bobby Kennedy the night he was assassinated; in the room with Richard Nixon when he resigned; on the Meredith march with Martin Luther King, Jr.; and covered the aftermath of Katrina in New Orleans.

Benson describes the night he learned that he would be travelling to America with the band. “Late one night in January 1964, the phone rang in my London flat. It was the night picture editor of a London newspaper, asking me to fly to Paris with the Beatles to cover their first trip abroad as England’s top pop stars.” 

One of Benson’s most iconic images shows the band in a gleeful pillow fight in a hotel room after learning that they were going to perform on The Ed Sullivan Show. This image displays one of the band’s rare unguarded moments, marking the moment before the band changed American pop culture forever.

“He invariably extracts a person’s soul in a single image, subtly cultivating a subject’s character without the subject even knowing it,” observes Barbara Baker Burrows, his picture editor at LIFE Magazine.


“He knows when to stand back from a subject, and when to move in. And when he moves in, it’s for the kill,” adds David Schonauer, former editor of American Photo Magazine.

He has had 40 gallery solo exhibitions, and fourteen books of his photographs have been published, including his newest book, The Beatles: On the Road 1964-1966 which celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Beatles coming to America and includes intimate portraits from the famous pillow fight at the Georges V hotel to the hysterical young female crowds, from TV studios to backstage. He was named twice as the National Press Photographer's Association Photographer of the Year.
 

His photographs are in the permanent collection of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. Both museums hosted his Harry Benson: Being There exhibition (2006-7). A major retrospective exhibition of Benson’s photographs was at Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow, Scotland from June through September 2008. Under contract to LIFE Magazine from 1970 to 2000, and took more than 100 cover shots for People Magazine. Benson is presently under contract to Vanity Fair Magazine, and he photographs for Architectural Digest, Newsweek and many other major magazines. Benson lives in New York with his wife Gigi who works with him on his book and exhibition projects. Their two daughters Wendy and Tessa live and work in Los Angeles.

I know you visit my blog to find out what I’m up to, and part of what I’m up to is taking advantage of – and promoting – the artistic and cultural benefits that come with living in the paradise we call home here in Southwest Florida.

More tomorrow …..