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      <h1>Richard Benson In Memory 1943 - 2017</h1>
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        <h2>A Letter from Dean Marta Kuzma</h2>
        <p>Dear Members of the Yale School of Art Community,</p>
        <p>It is with sincere regret that I must inform you of the death of Richard Benson—a renowned authority on the
          history of photographic printing, an American photographer, an author, a former Yale University professor, and
          Dean of the Yale School of Art from 1996 to 2006. I hadn’t the opportunity to get to know my predecessor,
          although one does not need to look far to understand his immense contribution to the field of photography.
          Some years ago, The Guardian’s literary editor Liz Jobey aptly wrote:</p>
        <p>“A long time ago I read a New Yorker profile of a master photographic printer called Richard Benson. It was
          titled, with that deliberate matter-of-factness that New Yorker titles invariably have, ‘A single person
          making a single thing’. This man was a unique craftsman, who great photographers and great institutions turned
          to when they wanted their pictures printed better than ever before. He had printed photographs by Alfred
          Stieglitz, Paul Strand and Lee Friedlander, as well as three volumes of the works of great French photographer
          Eugène Atget for the Museum of Modern Art. He had made an unsurpassed volume of prints for the collector
          Howard Gilman, whose collection is now part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. And in 1986 Benson
          had been awarded a MacArthur Foundation grant worth nearly quarter of a million dollars to carry on doing what
          he did so well.”</p>
        <p>As a testimony to the series of lectures he had given at the Yale School of Art over a period of three
          decades, Richard Benson, more commonly known among friends as “Chip” co-curated with Peter Galassi an
          exhibition at New York’s MoMA in 2008 called “The Printed Picture.” The exhibition and accompanying book
          reflected Benson’s perspective on the evolution of the printed still image and traced the changing technology
          of making and distributing pictures from the Renaissance to the present. He was the recipient of numerous
          honors including two publication grants from the National Endowment of the Arts; two Guggenheim fellowships;
          the Rhode Island Governor’s Medal for the Arts; and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. His work—located within
          the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum; New York’s MoMA; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in
          Kansas City, Missouri; and the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven; among others.</p>
        <p>Upon his retirement from Yale, the acclaimed photographer and Yale School of Art Professor Emeritus Tod
          Papageorge noted in his Tribute to Richard Benson, “He’s a special kind, the sort that reminds us that the
          words genius and genial share a common root. For who here doesn’t understand that Benson’s great good nature
          is at the core of his ability to accomplish so much in so many different ways?” Tod has written another
          tribute in memory of Chip, which you can read on the School of Art website by clicking here .</p>
        <p>I expect there are so many who would wish to express their sincere condolences and also to reflect upon Chip
          Benson as a friend, teacher, and dean. We ask that you kindly send your thoughts to the School of Art so that
          we may gather these respects in celebration of Richard Benson and share them with our community in the coming
          weeks.</p>
        With respectful wishes,<br>
        Marta Kuzma Dean Yale School of Art New Haven
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        <h2>RICHARD BENSON: IN MEMORIAM</h2>
        <p>Richard Benson was born and raised in the seacoast town of Newport, Rhode Island, the third and youngest son
          of a Quaker mother and an ardent Catholic father. As a boy, he was so happy in his skin that his mother called
          him her “little ray of sunshine”; later on, befitting a child whose father was a stonecutter, she and nearly
          everyone else came to call him “Chip.”</p>
        <p>His father, John Howard Benson, considered the greatest calligrapher and stone-letterer of his time, died
          when Chip was twelve. The year before, W. K. Wimsatt, a chess partner of Benson’s and a legendary English
          professor at Yale, successfully championed his dying friend for an honorary degree at the university, joining,
          for the first time, the Benson name and the school. This, however, had no observable effect on Chip, who, left
          with only a few sharp memories of his father, and thereby insulated from having to measure his life against
          that of an extraordinary man, gave up his education after one semester at Brown, explaining to Brown’s
          president—another friend of John Howard Benson’s—that he was leaving the school so that he could work with his
          hands. (It’s worth adding that Richard was directed from the president’s office to the dean of students for
          his send-off, which, in its entirety, consisted of the dean reading to him the first chapter of Moby
          Dick.)</p>
        <p>From Providence, he took a crooked course for himself, moving on from the Navy to a minimum-wage job in a
          Connecticut printing plant and then an unparalleled career back in Newport as a photographer, master printer,
          and inventor of radical new techniques of photographic reproduction. Only after all of that did he himself
          cross paths with Yale, first as a great teacher in the Department of Photography and, fifteen years later, as
          an admired dean of the School of Art, before retiring in 2011 to pursue whatever interests attracted the sharp
          edge of his curiosity.</p>
        <p>In 1986, Richard was awarded a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, an achievement characterized in the
          popular press as the “genius” award. In his case, the description was appropriate, as anyone who was exposed
          to the range and depth of his understanding about any number of things, including, of course, photography—or
          sailing ships or electricity or hydraulics—would testify. But, to my mind, Richard more nearly demonstrated
          through his life and actions that “genius” shares a common root with the word “genial,” the subject I feel
          myself pressed to write about here. For his great, good nature was at the core of his ability to accomplish so
          much in so many different ways, and to earn effortlessly the admiration and love of so many people. After all,
          who can resist loving the person who, out of hand, has just offered to help by giving over his time and
          knowledge in response to an earnest, or even casual, request? And, moreover, a person who, it turns out, will
          give more greatly the more he’s asked to, as if, like the sun, he trusts his own energy will grow as its
          excess burns away serving others.</p>
        <p>We’ve recently learned that, put crudely, the more a person gives, the happier, or better, he or she will
          feel, a truth that’s now been traced in the workings of the brain. Richard Benson demonstrated that bit of
          science in how he lived, although, in his case, it appeared that feeling good, his natural state, directed his
          doing good, rather than the other way around. And, perhaps because of this difference, his mode and range of
          doing good, at least to me, seemed virtually Olympian, by being so outsized and barely earthbound (although,
          like the sailor he was, the man himself cantered his way bow-legged through the world). For as his students
          and friends all recognized, there was something large and unprecedented in his willingness to shower his
          energy and brilliance on everyone around him, more and yet more, today and forever. Until now.</p>
        <p>Perhaps, rather than invoking the sun and the Olympians, it would have been enough for me to say about
          Richard that whenever I worked through the logic of imagining a possible model of an achieved human being for
          my son, I invariably ended up with him, a man who straddled with natural ease—I’d guess because of his happy
          marriage to Barbara—what artists often find to be the intractable contradiction between loving and art that
          Yeats described as “the perfection of the life or of the work.” But this isn’t the time, immediately after his
          death, for teasing contradictions into sense. And so I’ve been led, at least at this moment, to invoke a star,
          and the Greek gods, to counter sense. For Richard Benson was so unrelentingly generous, and good, and spirited
          in the manner that only the very best of us have been, that a nod to the heavens—or more, as each of us is
          inclined—seems the least we can do to honor his memory. A small enough gesture to give back to our dear friend
          and extraordinary man.</p>
        <p>The first portion of this text was adapted from a talk presented by Tod Papageorge during a celebration of
          Richard Benson’s deanship, from 1995 to 2006, of the Yale School of Art.</p>
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