Richard Mead Atwater Benson (November 8, 1943 – June 22, 2017)[1] was an American photographer, printer, and educator who used photographic processing techniques of the past and present.[2][3]
"He is perhaps best known for his innovations in photographic offset printing techniques and, later, ink-jet printing."[4]
Benson began teaching photography at
Yale University in 1979 and was dean of the Yale School of Art from 1996 to 2006.[3][4][5] Benson had a broad range of interests in the photographic print: aluminum,[3] silver, platinum, palladium, and ink.[4] 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,[3] 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.[4]
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.[8]
Photographs from the Collection of the Gilman Paper Company. White Oak, 1985.
OCLC14377747. 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.
Richard Benson Lectures at Yale (contains the full 8-hour video of Benson's lectures at MOMA discussing the various technologies presented in "The Printed Picture" exhibition)