Insights help you get the picture Museum lecturer shares his passion for photographs

BANGOR – Richard Benson is a man who likes to know how things work. He owns a 1934 “hot rod” that he souped up in his garage. For a few years, he ran his house on DC electricity, which was fine, except that every time his wife turned on an appliance, something blew out.

In art circles, however, he’s known for neither cars nor current. In the late 1960s, his tinkering with inks and halftones revolutionized the way photographs are printed. Today he is considered one of the best photographic printers in the world, and he has earned a reputation for his own painterly photographs.

But on Monday night, during a sold-out lecture at the University of Maine Museum of Art, his writing took center stage.

In 1997, Benson and his longtime friend John Szarkowski, the legendary photographer and curator at Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art, teamed up to produce “A Maritime Album.” From more than 500,000 photographs in the archives of the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Va., Szarkowski culled 100 of particular interest and asked Benson to write essays about each.

Though Szarkowski couldn’t make it to Maine on Monday as scheduled, Benson described how the book, and resulting photo exhibition, which is on view through April 2 at the museum, came together.

“I received 100 pictures in order. My task was to write about each of them,” said Benson, who is the dean of the art school at Yale University. “The real thing that the writing is about is trying to decide what the picture is about. I’m interested in how a photograph works and I’m interested in how the thing in the photograph works. I think each picture tells a different story.”

And the story is about maritime technology – from sail to steam engine. As Benson spoke to the crowd of about 100, he walked around the gallery, pointing out photographic techniques and describing the cameras used for certain pictures. That’s his area of expertise.

But it was clear that the technology in the photos in “A Maritime Album” captured his interest more than technique. As he pointed to a photo with a purple tinge from the chemicals used to process it, his voice became animated as he shifted to the subject matter: the first plane to take off from a ship at sea.

“It’s an absolutely crazy picture,” he said. “The person who took it must’ve been out of his mind.”

Then he moved on to a photo that looked ordinary enough at first, until he pointed out that the smoke in the background came from a painting, the water seemed all wrong, and the edges of the original photo didn’t match up with the finished product – it was a copy.

“It’s a complete fake,” he said. “I don’t believe anything in it at all, and I love the picture.”

Benson had no say in the selection of photographs. They’re completely unlike his own work, and he doesn’t use them in his classes at Yale as part of his lectures, but he’s fascinated with them on several levels. He likes the technology, the subject matter, the technique and the stories.

He and Szarkowski originally teamed up for a four-book series on Eugene Atget, and Benson has since printed work by such visionaries as Lee Friedlander and Paul Strand, but the images in “A Maritime Album” – many taken by passers-by or anonymous photographers – are special to him.

“None of them are like other pictures I’ve seen, which is really of interest to me,” he said. “Maybe what we really need in photography is part of what we’ve never seen before.”

Kristen Andresen can be reached at 990-8287 and kandresen@bangordailynews.net.