North South East West

Book excerpt: Richard Benson, former dean of the Yale School of Art and a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, has been a photographer for more than four decades, but until now his art often took a back seat to his prodigious achievements as a printer and a teacher. This volume presents one hundred photographs by Benson, highlighting the unique properties of his prints and exemplifying his fresh techniques for reproducing them for publication. From direct digital capture through inkjet output, his renowned technical wizardry has yielded unusually vibrant and beguiling colour prints that are at once ultra vivid and utterly natural, like our everyday visual experience. Their uncanny lushness and clarity give voice to Benson's generous, inquisitive eye. An essay by Peter Galassi, Chief Curator of Photography at MoMA, surveys the work, and a text by Benson explains how it was made.