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." He learned about lenses and optics in his time in the navy. Benson had a broad range of interests in the photographic print: aluminum,

Publications Lay This Laurel. Eakins, 1973. Co-authored with Lincoln Kirstein. . Photographs from the Collection of the Gilman Paper Company. White Oak, 1985. . With acknowledgements by Howard Gilman, an introduction by Pierre Apraxine, notes to the plates by Lee Marks and an afterword by Benson. Benson made multiple halftone films from each photograph, exposed those films to plates, and printed the plates on a single-color sheet-fed offset printing press. A Maritime Album: 100 Photographs and Their Stories. Newport News, Virginia: Mariners' Museum; Yale University Press, 1997. Co-authored with John Szarkowski. . A Yale Album: The Third Century. A Yale Tercentennial Book. Yale University Press, 2001. . The Printed Picture. Museum of Modern Art, 2008. . Exhibition catalog of an eponymous 2008–2009 exhibition at MoMA, co-curated with Peter Galassi.

Awards Honors and awards given to him 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

Collections Benson's work is held in the following permanent collections: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA: 3 prints (as of March 2019) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: 70 prints (as of March 2019) Museum of Modern Art, New York: 21 prints (as of March 2019) San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA: 11 prints (as of March 2019) Whitney Museum of American Art, New York: 8 prints (as of March 2019)