Interview: Harry Benson
He proved them all wrong
The Sunday Times, July 23 2006
Harry Benson is famous for his iconic photographs of presidents and pop stars, but his life has been one long battle to be taken seriously, he tells Kenny Farquharson
Every cutting remark Harry Benson has endured, every disparaging slight from a teacher or discouraging word from a parent, every humiliating put-down from a boss or a rival, he has carried with him intact into his 77th year.
Some people let time take the edge off life’s setbacks, giving them a patina of nostalgia. Not Benson. Slumped on a settee in his 18th-floor apartment on the prosperous Upper East Side of Manhattan, the renowned photographer nurses a lifetime of wounds.
His father, who ran Glasgow zoo, called him stupid and repeatedly told him he was a disappointment. His head teacher kicked him out of school at 13 and told him not to come back. When he was a young snapper with the Hamilton Advertiser, he was ignored by the Glasgow newspapers, where he craved a job.
“Word had got around that I wasn’t such a nice guy,” he says, one hand sweeping back his shock of white hair, the other absent-mindedly petting his pet pug Daisy. “There was a bit of fisticuffs with other photographers, usually over nothing. I was once told by a newspaper man that I would be better off feeding animals in my daddy’s zoo. The piece of s***. I got the bastard later on.” He declines to elaborate.
Benson keeps these wounds raw, not to wallow in self-pity, but to gain strength from them. They keep him tough. He has the satisfaction of knowing he eventually proved his doubters wrong, every one of them.
The apartment in one of New York’s most well-heeled neighbourhoods is all the evidence you need of Benson’s success as one of the world’s most prized photographers: the man Jackie Kennedy asked to do pictures at her daughter’s wedding, the man Michael Jackson asks for by name, the man who has photographed US presidents for the past four decades.
A uniformed concierge greets you warily and phones upstairs to see if you are welcome. The home Benson shares with his wife, Gigi, is two apartments knocked into one, with a corner roof terrace looking out over the rooftops and water towers of the Manhattan skyline.
Despite his age, Benson has the pugilistic body language of the young hustler he was in his twenties. There is a twinkle in his eyes, but they are still capable of a coldness. The Glasgow accent survives.
We speak over a typically New York breakfast: bagels, cream cheese, scrambled eggs, weak coffee. On one wall of his living room is a giant poster from a 1950s Glasgow dance hall, so big that it is cut in half, with the two sections placed side by side.
On another wall is a large print of Benson’s most famous photograph — the one that launched his career — showing the Beatles having a pillow fight in a Paris hotel room in 1964. It was taken the day the band were told by their manager, Brian Epstein, that I Want to Hold Your Hand was number one in America and they were heading for New York. Benson travelled with them and when they went home, he stayed.
His work in the 40 years since then for magazines such as Life, People, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair is displayed in all its violence, glamour and drama in a retrospective exhibition, Being There, which opens at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery on August 4.
There you can see Benson’s American presidents. Nixon being consumed by Watergate. George W Bush making a fist at the camera. The Reagans dancing in the White House. Hillary Clinton leaning over to kiss husband Bill, who is lounging in a hammock. “That was a picture that I had to work on, that needed a bit of encouragement,” he recalls. “‘Move in closer.’ ‘Give him a kiss.’”
There is the raw reportage that took him to conflicts in Kuwait, the West Bank, Bosnia, Pakistan and Afghanistan. There are the glamour shots of the finest talents in Hollywood and popular culture: Sinatra, Ali, Cash, McQueen.
Most memorably, there are pictures from what he calls “America’s nervous breakdown” in the 1960s, especially the struggle of the civil-rights movement. Nobody chronicled this better than Benson, who looked at this convulsion with the eyes of someone still discovering what the nation was all about.
He was there in the Ambassador hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, the moment Bobby Kennedy was shot. In recalling the moment, Benson still stiffens with the drama of it. Most people’s instinct at a shooting would be to try to help the wounded, but Benson knew there was work to be done.
“In that kind of situation you are like a horse with blinkers,” he says. “This is it. Let me f*** up tomorrow, not now. This is what I came into the business for. Do not fail. I knew Bobby. I liked him. He was just about from here to that chair,” he motions to an armchair about 10ft away, “when he was hit.”
Throughout this period, when trust was often scarce, Benson believes his Scottishness was an asset in making a direct connection with the people he met. “You don’t have any baggage with being Scottish. It’s not the same with the English, and nobody gives a f*** about the Welsh.”
However, being Scottish meant different things to different people. It helped him form relationships with two men on opposing sides in the civil-rights debate: Martin Luther King and the Southern segregationist George Wallace.
“King liked the Scottish Presbyterian way of respecting the sabbath. He said Scotland was a very good place — a very ‘righteous’ place was what he said.”
Wallace also took a shine to the young Scot, showing him around his governor’s mansion. Scottishness, for this racist, was something entirely different, an indicator of ethnic purity. “He showed me his family tree. God knows what bastards were on there.”
With such disparate subject matter, it is hard to pin down what makes a Benson picture. He says he tries to “have some air” in a photograph, for it not to be too staged and static. Every time he goes into a shoot he has a concept in mind: “If you go in with nothing, that’s what you can come out with.”
But there is a danger in too much planning. “I’m looking for things not to go right, but to go wrong. Like a dog, you jump on the scrap. Then you get out of Dodge before they change their mind.”
He still works when the mood takes him: he was recently in Milan doing a fashion shoot for Playboy. “I’m not precious. It’s fun. The thing about my career was I would do anything. Other photographers thought they were too good to do some things. I did all the crap that was going.” The money rolled in because he kept copyright of his pictures, refusing to sign over the rights for short-term gain, as many colleagues did to their cost.
The Edinburgh retrospective is, perhaps inevitably, seen by Benson as a vindication, an up-yours to the detractors down the years, including his father. “I’ve probably spent my life trying to prove my father wrong,” he concedes. “There is bitterness there. Your parents are not aware of the anguish you are going through, of being a loser.”
These days he is careful not to make similar mistakes when asked to comment on some young photographer’s work. “I say it’s good, even if it’s crap.”
His parents are now dead, his mother having passed away just 12 years ago. “I would have liked her to see the exhibition,” he says. “And there was one teacher, Miss McKenzie. The class were all laughing at something I wrote that was really stupid. And she told them: ‘I can tell you right now, Benson is going to end up better than any one of you.’ I would have liked to say goodbye to that lady.”
Being There opens at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery on Aug 4 and runs until Jan 7, 2007
