Sarasota Art Museum opens a lens on noted photographer Richard Benson

Curator Peter Barberie has spent years studying the work of photographer and printer Peter Benson, and he believes it’s time that more people know his work.

Barberie, who is the Brodsky Curator of Photographs, Alfred Stieglitz Center at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is quick to acknowledge that Benson “is not well enough known for his remarkable achievement,” which is what led to his putting together “The World is Smarter Than You Are,” the first career retrospective of the photographer’s work.

It was first presented at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2021 and will be on display at the Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College through May 7.

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The show features about 100 works by Benson, along with photos by 10 artists who studied or worked with him during his many years teaching at Yale.

“In the photo world, he is revered, thought of, spoken of as this amazing mentor and teacher and printer,” Barberie said during a recent break from setting up the exhibit. “He’s best known for his teaching and his printing acumen.”

Benson, who died at 73 in 2017, was “the most knowledgeable human about the history of the printed image. He had this amazing voracious interest in every way there is in the world to make a print,” Barberie said.

Barberie said the show follows Benson’s trajectory through different methods, from darkrooms and chemicals through offset printing to inkjet printing.

“If he had lived five years longer, he would have said we’re done with prints and now we’re on to screens,” Barberie said. “He felt the technology of screens had gotten to the point where they could produce better images.”

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In the 1980s, Benson was hired by the Gilman Paper Company to reproduce 200 historic photos from its private collection. It included rare prints and work by such noted photographers as Mathew Brady, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Diane Arbus and Alfred Stieglitz and more.

Benson produced the book “The Printed Picture” that accompanied an exhibition mounted at the Museum of Modern Art in 2008. Barberie has created a book version of “The World Is Smarter Than You Are” as a companion to his museum retrospective.

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One addition not featured in the Philadelphia exhibit is the inclusion of works by 10 of Benson’s former students at Yale, inspired by an exhibit that ran concurrently at the TILT Institute for the Contemporary Image in Philadelphia.

Sara Solfter, one of his students who founded TILT, “is one of the people who revered Benson,” Barberie said. She organized the TILT show, which evolved into the book “Object Lesson,” published by Aperture. “There was a nice synergy between the two,” he said. He also liked the idea of featuring works by students in a museum on the campus of an art school.

Rangsook Yoon, who joined Sarasota Art Museum as senior curator in November, said she is “hoping we can engage the college community, the faculty and the students, with the exhibit."

She said the exhibition is multilayered.

“This was an artist who was a photographer’s photographer,” she said. “Each individual work has this intimacy that can be appealing to a lot of people. Some people can come just enjoy the pictures, but if they’re interested in learning about the history of technology of photos, they can also learn that part.

The exhibit coincides with the opening a second, smaller display “Sara Berman’s Closet.” It is an installation created by multidisciplinary artists Maira Kalman and Alex Kalman, the daughter and grandson of Sara Berman, a Jewish emigre from Belarus to Israel. At age 60, she left her husband of 38 years and began a new life in a studio apartment in Greenwhich Village in New York. She decided to wear only white.

Her daughter and grandson took note of how ordered her closet was and decided to preserve the contents, which they first recreated in 2015 at the Mmuseumm in lower Manhattan. The installation also has been seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Both exhibits are on display Feb. 5-May 7 at the Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College, 1001 S. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota. 941-309-4300; sarasotaartmuseum.org

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This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Photography career of Richard Benson on display at Sarasota Art Museum